site.btaOmbudsman's 2023 Report Spotlights Rights Violations, Deprivation in Psychiatries, Prisons, Children's Correctional Facilities

Bulgaria's Ombudsman Diana Kovatcheva has published the 11th Annual Report based on inspections at places for deprivation of liberty in 2023 carried out under the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM), Kovatcheva's press office said. The NPM monitors, verifies and assesses the respect for human rights in prisons, detention centres, medical and social care homes for children, family-type accommodation centres for children and adults, psychiatric institutions, homes for adults with disabilities, mental disorders and dementia, and migrant and refugee centres.

The NPM team carried out 50 inspections in 2023, sent 129 recommendations to state authorities and followed up on the implementation of measures to improve conditions in places for accommodation, detention or imprisonment. The conclusion is that systemic problems persisted despite numerous alerts to the responsible institutions. Underfunding and chronic staff shortages remained unresolved, hampering the provision of quality medical and health care for persons in all categories of inspected facilities. There was a lack of public financing for social activities in places for serving sentences so that social work and the reintegration of prisoners remained problematic for many prisons.

In the last two years the Ombudsman focused on the protection of the rights of people with mental illness. In 2022 and 2023, the Ombudsman's team carried out 25 unannounced inspections in psychiatric care facilities and residential service centres. Between 2019 to 2022, the responsible authorities were alerted repeatedly to chronic problems in state psychiatric hospitals, including degrading living conditions, chronic malnutrition of patients due to a wrong funding model, poor quality medical care, staff shortages and lack of social services helping the reintegration of patients.

Kovatcheva insists that urgent measures be taken to prevent any form of degrading treatment or torture. First, torture should be defined as an offence in its own right, and second, effective control should be exercised. The prosecution service should exercise regular supervision over the implementation of punitive and other coercive measures in all state psychiatric hospitals because they are categorized as places of detention, the Ombudsman's press office said.

The Ombudsman also recommends an update of the legislation on the procedure for temporary physical restraint measures in patients with established mental disorders. A protocol should be drawn up for the application of immobilization and isolation, which should spell out the permissible duration and frequency of isolating and restraining (tying) patients in a 24-hour span, and specify the grounds on which these measures are applied.

The NPM Report also focuses on deficiencies in the rights of children in conflict with the law. It stresses the need to adopt a long-term national policy and strategy for juvenile justice. The authorities' efforts should be fully focused on the rapid closure of institutions for children in conflict with the law and the creation of a protected social system including a network of services (integrated services and educational, psycho-social and protective measures and support mechanisms) for these children.