Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2009 (IPS) – At 37, Dimo Kokorkov, a carpenter from Stara Zagora in central Bulgaria is broken-hearted . Dimo says this to describe his sense of deep injustice after being systematically abused in prison because of his disabilities.
Officially diagnosed as mentally disabled, Dimo suffers from frequent headaches, nausea and loss of control over his body. According to him, his problem has been caused by the pain I endured during and since my prison term.
Dimo received a 23-year prison sentence for theft. After my mother remarried, I was left on my own, I was poor, so I had to steal in order to eat, he told IPS. I started doing the usual things, stealing copper and wires. I know what I did was not right, but the sentence was extremely unfair.
Through his prison years, he started developing the symptoms he suffers from now. They transformed him into a target of abuse and harassment by other prisoners and prison staff.
Over the past year, while imprisoned in Bourgas, eastern Bulgaria, he began seeking help from human rights organisations, which he contacted by mail from prison. The harassment got worse, he told IPS, after the prison director learnt that he had contacted human rights groups.
The reason for the increased aggression, from inmates and staff, is that I tried to ask for my rights, he says.
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While in prison, Dimo started cutting himself and even sewed his mouth. I wanted to make them react the medical staff, the prison chief, and the whole judicial system. After his release this year, Dimo filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Justice, accusing the authorities of discrimination and failure to ensure the rights of the incarcerated persons.
All I want is justice , Dimo says.
The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC), which provides him with legal assistance in the case, sees the lawsuit as an attempt to address the issue of mistreatment of people with disabilities incarcerated in Bulgarian prisons.
BHC, a non-governmental organisation for the protection of human rights based in Sofia, is pursuing a strategy of adressing discrimination against people with disabilities in the country through lawsuits. This is the strongest tool in the hands of civil society groups working in Central and Eastern Europe to change government policies and public attitudes.
All countries in Central and Eastern Europe have national legislation protecting the rights of people with disabilities. Membership of the European Union obliges them to adhere to yet another layer of legislation promoting these rights. All countries in the region have also signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But implementation of these legal norms is still deficient in most countries in the region.
A core change introduced by international legislation is to treat persons with disabilities as fully autonomous and only needing assistance in order to perform certain functions. This is a radical change for societies in Central and Eastern Europe, and one to which they are slow to adjust.
In Bulgaria, says Aneta Genova, a lawyer with BHC, people placed under guardianship have no rights to decide anything in their lives, not even on the food they eat in some cases.
Judges are quick to place people with disabilities under full guardianship, effectively depriving them of all civil rights, without conducting proper psychological evaluations of the needs of each person. According to Genova, this practice is an expression of a general view in Bulgarian society that there is no hope for people with disabilities.
The most progressive country in the region is Hungary, which has introduced provisions for various levels of partial guardianship in a new civil code brought in last year.
According to an August 2008 report of the Budapest-based Mental Disabilities Advocacy Centre (MDAC), the new Hungarian civil code gives persons under guardianship more rights to challenge the guardians decisions and more control over the guardian. Hungarian law now provides for regular review of guardianship and the obligation of authorities to hear in person from everyone subjected to the guardianship procedure.
The no hope mentality has its strongest negative impact on young children diagnosed with disabilities, who are quickly placed in special institutions, thus effectively segregated. This prevents their normal development, and often condemns them to institutionalisation for life.
While these special institutions have been the target of media attention and public condemnation for the last two decades, some still remain open, and abuses continue to be reported.
A visit by members of the Romanian non-governmental group Centre for Juridical Resources to the centre for recuperation for people with mental disabilities in Bolintin-Vale in southern Romania brought to light a dramatic reality.
During our visit, which took place at about noon, we found all the patients in the courtyard, half-dressed or naked, all with their hair cut very short because of fear of infections, says Georgiana Pascu, programme manager with the group. They beds were not clean. And none of them was engaged in any rehabilitation activity, even though Romanian legislation provides for such activities to take place in the centres.
In Bulgaria, 75 deaths of children with disabilities placed under state care in special institutions has still not been investigated. This is the subject of yet another lawsuit filed by BHC against the General Prosecutor s Office.
The practice of using restraints and cage beds for people detained in special institutions remains widespread in the Czech Republic, says MDAC, which supports local Czech groups in filing lawsuits to eliminate this practice.
But some good news is beginning to emerge. The number of children with disabilities included in regular educational programmes is increasing.
Polish law requires all companies with more than 25 employees to hire disabled people, even though frequent changes in legislation and the potential for various interpretations of the same law discourage employers from hiring persons with disabilities, according to Monika Tykarska from the Polish Organisation of Disabled People s Employers.
For now, progress seems slow and insufficient. But public attitudes in the region are changing, with opinion polls in most countries showing people increasingly open to live together and work with people with disabilities. And this change is crucial, says Genova, the BHC lawyer.
What we are really hoping for (with our cases) is a change in the attitude of the Bulgarian community and authorities. In this way, prosecutors will make better controls of the care given in institutions, and citizens will feel stronger about asking from their politicians that proper care is given to people with disabilities.
