The lawyers came together to strengthen their capacities to provide legal aid to persons with mental disabilities. The Institute for Penal Reform staged a roundtable meeting to discuss a set of recommendations concerning the lawyers’ activity.
About 100,000 people in Moldova suffer from mental disabilities. This means that a person in 35 has a light a more serious form of mental disability. Each year, 20,000 people are hospitalized, while about 2,000 of these stay in hospital on a permanent basis. “Currently, about 3,000 persons with mental disabilities cannot do a legal activity. Under the current legislation, they are unable to do something from legal viewpoint,” UNDP Moldova program analyst Evghenii Goloscheapov said in the event.
For this reason, the lawyers must be well trained so that they could defend these people’s interests. “There are many situations when the lawyers are involved in defending the rights of persons with disabilities. We are making effort to synthesize the national practices so as to formulate a set of recommendations that would be afterward used by lawyers in their daily activity. We now have draft recommendations that will be discussed with lawyers so that these could later use them as methodological support,” Institute for Penal Reform director Victor Zaharia has told IPN.
“It is very hard to submit a complaint about the abuses committed with regard to persons with mental disabilities so that the case is examined in court as the judicial personnel is often reticent and do not believe the persons with disabilities. But these are most of the times very sincere. The agents of the state must be more receptive and professional in examining cases. Consequently, the persons with disabilities remain with the sustained traumas,” said the representative of the Office of the People’s Ombudsman Gheorghe Bosyi.
The roundtable meeting was held within the project “Strengthening the lawyers’ capacity to provide legal aid to victims of torture and men and women with mental disabilities”, which is implemented with the support of the European Union and the United Nations Development Program in Moldova.
