Mulligan to Catherine Day: Briefing Note on Romanian Human Rights Issues

sday, February 14, 2006

Briefing Note on Romanian Human Rights Issues

This is the official briefing from John Mulligan, Chairman, Focus on Romania, to the Secretary General of the European Commission, Catherine Day. A note about 36,000 children still in institutional care - that is not the total number of children under the care of the State. The accurate number is 110,000. This has been brought to the attention of Mr. Mulligan so his report can be revised. Focus on Romania is out of Ireland.

To: Ms Catherine Day, Secretary General, the European Commission.

From: John Mulligan, Chairman, Focus on Romania.

Subject: Briefing note on Romanian Human Rights issues.

I refer to our short discussion in Dublin on Friday 10th February, following your informative summary the state of the EU in 2006. Such briefings are very useful in informing various interest groups as to the challenges facing the Commission, and I found your presentation to be both interesting and informative. Any briefing process however has to have a two-way element in order to be of real value; I hope that some of the queries raised were of equal value in giving you a perspective on the problems of persuading the civil servants within the Commission as to the need to look again at some issues which they may consider as being closed.

As promised the following is a summary of the actual situation on the ground in Romania in the area of institutional reforms and human rights. We welcome the opportunity to provide you with this information, which we hope will be of assistance to you in dealing with the issue of Romania’s accession process. We also hope that your use of this information will help to bring some hope to the tens of thousands of people who have been abandoned not only by their own government but also by the European Union. A unique opportunity to link Romania’s accession process to real reforms, as distinct from the juggling of statistics, is being lost because the Enlargement Commission is paying little more than lip service to this linkage.

The Romanian situation vis-à-vis institutional care is complex, but essentially has three basic elements, as follows.

1. Children under eighteen years of age are the responsibility of the Department of child protection (now known as Children’s rights).

2. ANPH is in charge of adult persons with handicap.

3. An unknown number of persons reside in mental hospitals.

Since January 2005 Social Protection departments within local authorities look after persons in the ANPH and Child Rights categories, but the separate ANPH and Child Rights departments continue to exist at central level. Decisions around mental hospitals are the responsibility of the Health Department.

Resources were applied to the child protection area primarily because EU and international pressure focused on this area. Approximately 36,000 children under 18 still reside in institutional care, and some substantial progress has been made in designing reforms, although these have not always trickled down to the target group. The government used this progress to persuade the European Union that the entire problem was well on a way to a resolution, despite the fact that the larger (and growing) problem of young adults in state care had not been addressed at all. Despite claims to the contrary by EU politicians and officials, the Romanian Government conceded to us as far back as July 2002 that they had no budget and no policies to resolve the problem of adults in state care.

Following that admission, we succeeded in having a project team and a full-time project manager put in place in ANPH, in order to provide a skills pool that could drive the reform process and disseminate the skills and information to the local authorities. We also achieved agreement with the Romanian Government that our proposal to close one institution – at Negru Voda in Constanta County – would be adopted, and that this closure would form a template for the closure of all such institutions. The closure model would consist of a state of the art centre for residential and respite care in the town of Techirghiol, and four group homes in the community around Constanta city, each of which would be home to eight young adults who had been assessed as being capable of semi-independent living. Funding for the main centre would come from ANPH and the local authority, and the four homes would be co-funded by the County Council and our NGO group. This pilot project was adopted as government policy, and it was agreed that this closure process would be complete by mid 2003, although this was later revised to mid 2004. This project has not as of today still been completed; only the group homes element segment as co-funded by us has come to some kind of conclusion, with 16 young adults moved to two of the four new homes in December 2005. The third and fourth homes have just last week entered the construction phase and delivery of these has been promised for August 2006. Building work on the main centre is ongoing, but no firm completion date can as yet be given for this segment.

Current state of the reform process in ANPH:

Following various delays, the construction phase of the pilot project began in late 2003, and now looks to be complete by August 2006. Training modules for the staff of the group homes have been devised by our partners the Aurelia Trust, and are being delivered by Romanian Trainers in line with (revised) target dates. This training project has been agreed with ANPH, and is being funded by the Irish NGOs. A programme of de-institutionalisation is already underway in Negru Voda for beneficiaries in this sector, and again this programme is being funded and managed by the Aurelia Trust.

Training of staff for the main centre at Techirghiol is being managed by ANPH, with subcontracted assistance from an Irish NGO and with financial assistance from the Irish Government through its DCI funding scheme. No rollout of the pilot project has taken place nationally -- in essence, a total of 16 persons out of 23,000 in the care of ANPH have been the beneficiaries of this reform process to date.

Issues in Mental Hospitals:

Along with Amnesty International, Focus on Romania continues to try to bring some kind of attention to the ongoing scandal of Romania’s mental hospitals. A comprehensive Amnesty International report in May 2004 highlighted human rights abuses in the Poana Mare hospital, where deaths from exposure and malnutrition, as well as the use of slave labour, were commonplace. This report was ignored until we raised it at a meeting with the head of the EU delegation (Jonathan Scheele) in late 2005, a meeting that was also attended by senior government officials and MEP Mairead McGuinness. Following that meeting, an announcement was made that that particular facility would close, but no plan exists to actually replace the facility with a more humane regime or with alternatives to institutional care in the mental health sector generally.

As late as 10th January 2006 a report by a Romanian journalist on the newspaper Evenimentul Zilei dealt with another mental health institution, at Urlati in Prahova County. Adult patients were here found naked in cages and being fed through flaps in the cage doors. In addition to these gross human rights abuses detected at this site, a five-year-old boy was found to be living among the adults; he was apparently born to a victim of an unreported rape of a female patient by persons unknown, and the authorities had not reported or detected his presence. This unbelievable level of human rights abuses is happening right now in this and similar institutions, despite many years of EU so-called scrutiny of Romania’s reform process.

The conditions in Romania’s mental hospitals are undoubtedly as bad as anything in the world, but have never been the focus on attention by the EU. The EU position, in general, has been to accept Romanian government reportage of progress at face value, when in reality such progress has consisted largely of the juggling of statistics in order to persuade politicians in Brussels that all was well.

Summary of progress over the last ten or so years:

Institutional care of children: This area has attracted most of the international focus, so almost all resources have been directed at this problem. Plans and strategies exist, but 36,000 children still live in institutions ranging from adequate to appalling. We are aware of locations where a lack of staffing resources is overcome by the use of daily sedation to manage the residents.

Institutional care of adults with handicap: This area has had some international focus, largely as a result of our lobbying. With the exception of the pilot project at Negru Voda, no other meaningful reforms have taken place in this sector. EU politicians, with a few exceptions, have ignored this sector.

Mental hospitals: The EU has never shown an interest in this sector, and when asked, has not even been able to ascertain the nature and extent of the problem. Because the EU shows no interest, the Romanian Government has not targeted this area for reform. Only Amnesty International and a small number of reporters have investigated the extent of the human rights abuses here, which include inadequate nutrition and denial of access to health care, cruel and inhumane treatment, and the use of slave labour.

Problems within the European Commission that hinder the reform process:

In addition to a lack of interest within the Commission (largely due it has to be said to a belief that reform of all these sectors is well underway), we have uncovered a frightening level of misinformation in Brussels. At a meeting in early 2005 with Mr. Dirk Lange and a team from the Romania desk of the Enlargement Commission, we were provided with figures that we knew to be wildly incorrect. However the officials concerned were not prepared to concede that they were wrong, despite our pointing out that the figures quoted by them only a fraction of those provided to us by the Romanian government. They had a point of view that this matter was now closed and could not be reopened for further discussion; in fact we found their approach to our views to be more aggressive and unbending than anything we had ever encountered in Brussels.

The relevant figures given to us at that meeting were as follows:

* No more than 5,000 persons in ANPH institutions

* No children under the age of three years in institutional care in all of Romania.

In March 2005 we ascertained during a meeting with ANPH in Bucharest that the first figure was of the order of 23,000, an almost five fold increase on the Commission figures.

We made enquiries as to the second “fact” within Romania, and we were easily able to ascertain that the sudden reduction in the numbers of infants in institutions was achieved by retaining them in maternity hospitals so as to keep them "off the radar” as far as the EU was concerned. We were able to find this information out easily by simply asking the question of officials in Local Authorities and within the health services, as could have been done by the Commission’s own staff in Romania if they had cared to check. In September 2005 we brought some reporters from Ireland, as well as MEP Mairead McGuinness, to a hospital in Constanta and showed them the extent of this deception.

Our concern around this misinformation relates to the reliance by Parliamentarians on information provided by the civil servants; in the absence of accurate information, how can the politicians make correct decisions in this area?

I trust that this information is of use to you in giving you a broader perspective on this issue than you might be able to get from within the Commission. The desirable end result of this communication process from a human rights standpoint would be the grasping of this unique opportunity to bring some relief to the suffering of the most disadvantage persons in Europe. If we do not deal with this issue in a real way as part of the accession process, we condemn tens of thousands of people with no voice to a lifetime of suffering. It is our belief that they have suffered enough.

12th February 2006

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