Turning a Blind Eye to Abuse in Romania
by Aisha Gawad
It has been the main goal of every Romanian government since the 1989 Revolution to gain entry into the European Union. In the past few years, Romania has been on a steady track towards entry, and on April 25, 2005, it signed the Accession Treaty, which states that Romania will join the Union in January of 2007 providing that it completes necessary reforms. In the past, one of the main reservations of current EU members regarding whether or not to allow Romania to join was its human rights record. Its record on the treatment of children in government-funded facilities, such as mental health hospitals, has been of particular concern.
Although Romania has passed legislation in the past few years to strengthen its child protection laws in order to satisfy EU criteria, many of these laws have not been adequately enforced. The country’s new law 272, for example, outlaws the placement of infants in psychiatric institutions unless the infants have “severe disabilities.” Recent findings from an investigation headed by the group, Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI), shows that despite this law, many infants, with or without disabilities, are kept in psychiatric institutions. Most of the infants have no identification papers, so they officially do not even exist. MDRI published a report on this investigation, Hidden Suffering: Romania’s Segregation and Abuse of Infants and Children with Disabilities on May 10, 2006. The report details Romania’s many violations of international and European child protection standards.
Children in several institutions were found to be emaciated to the point of “near death,” as described by MDRI executive director, Eric Rosenthal. Children are tied to cribs and furniture, sometimes defecating themselves. Due to massive staff shortages, some babies and young children never leave their cribs, which stunts growth and causes them to develop further disabilities. The MDRI report found that teenagers looked more like seven-year-olds, and seven-year-olds looked more like infants. Many were found with open and untreated wounds all over their bodies. Because of such extreme neglect, the report describes instances of self-mutilation. “One child sat stabbing himself in the eyes during our entire visit. Another ingested a long rope, spat it out and ingested it again, over and over,” the report says.
Children in these types of institutions are not only likely to develop more debilitating disabilities; they are also not likely to ever become part of a family or to join Romanian society in any way. Most of them will never live lives outside of the institution, and will ultimately die there.
These conditions seriously violate parts of the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), among others. The violations constitute various forms of physical deprivation as well as psychological damage. The CRC, for example, establishes it as the right of every “mentally or physically disabled child [to] enjoy a full and decent life, in conditions which ensure dignity, promote self-reliance, and facilitate the child’s active participation in the community.” As they are now, the institutions observed seem to achieve just the opposite. They provide an atmosphere where children have no chance of developing any sense of self-respect, the will or ability to become more independent, or the possibility of being integrated into the outside Romanian population.
MDRI found malnourished and abused children in six of the facilities that it visited, the worst of which was in the town of Braila. There are more than 30,000 children in Romania’s health institutions, and many more that are undocumented and off the public record. Romania’s Ministry of Health and Child Protection told MDRI that the number of institutions similar to that in Braila is unknown. The six institutions investigated by MDRI may be only a small example of pervasive human rights violations in Romania’s child care facilities.
It is the responsibility of the Romanian government, as it is of any other government, to ensure that its citizens are afforded the basic human rights that are established by international standards. The Romanian government, in this case, is clearly not taking responsibility for the inhumane treatment of this particular group in society because passing laws only nominally improves the suffering of these people. On paper, the Romanian government has improved by passing legislation, but this legislation is not being implemented or enforced. These laws will remain meaningless as long as the patients in psychiatric institutions are treated as less than human.
Olli Rehn, the Enlargement Commissioner for the European Commission, is the head of the committee which decides whether a nation can join the Union. In April 2006, prior to the publication of the MDRI report, Rehn remarked on what he sees as Romania’s improvement in the areas of child protection and the rights of disabled people. “Certainly, we all acknowledge that the situation as regards child protection in Romania is now much better than it used to be in previous years,” Rehn said. The shocking conditions described in the MDRI report, however, seem to have made no difference in Rehn’s outlook. On May 16, the Commission presented its Monitoring Report, which attempts to assess the improvement of both Romania and Bulgaria since October 2005. Despite the serious doubt cast on Romania’s commitment to human rights, the European Union’s report places it in an even stronger position to enter in 2007.
There is no doubt that Romania still needs to make serious improvements before it can be in line with international human rights laws. What is in doubt, however, is the European Union’s own commitment to human rights. If it can overlook such a critical failing in Romania, and allow it to join without any further investigations, then what does that say about the value that the EU itself places on the rights guaranteed to all human beings?
