The Infirm
The elderly, the infirm, babies born with defects are regarded as varsa (weeds) to the average Romanian. But public pressure to reform is a long way off. For the majority of Romanians, the idea of rights and social inclusion for the disabled is still a foreign concept, at odds with a culture that has long cast them as varsa (weeds).
"Romanians don’t think of disabled people as human beings." explains Andreia Moraru of the Academic Network of European Disability Experts. "They can’t conceive that they feel pain like the rest of us. They don’t believe they can improve, even the ones with low- or mid-level disabilities." [1]
"Romanians don’t think of disabled people as human beings." explains Andreia Moraru of the Academic Network of European Disability Experts. "They can’t conceive that they feel pain like the rest of us. They don’t believe they can improve, even the ones with low- or mid-level disabilities." [1]
My glimpse of hell and the pitiful children who have been betrayed
by Angela Levin for 'The Telegraph'
15 November 2010 - It is not often that you get a glimpse of hell but a version of it exists down an unmade road in Bistrita, northern Romania. There stands a place that would be unfit for animals, let alone humans, but it is the only home known to 35 inmates, ranging in age from a few weeks to early adulthood. All have some degree of physical or mental disability. The building has a small room where 10 so-called “babies” – including a pallid five-year-old and a malnourished and blind seven-year-old – sleep and spend every waking hour. It was lunchtime when we visited and the empty-eyed children were either being given a bottle or fed mashed potato in watery milk by elderly female carers.
I asked Anne Marie, the director of the orphanage, where the seven-year-old slept as the room only had small cots. “In the corner cot,” she pointed with a shrug. “He can’t stretch out but that is all we have.” In her forties, she seemed to run the place with breathtaking complacency and little sign of relating to the children in her care. Most disturbing of all was the unsettling quiet. Babies, whose cries always go unanswered, soon fall silent. As they grow older, they rock back and forth, later they self-harm and become very aggressive.
So I could only begin to imagine what had happened to Florin, a 17-year-old boy abandoned at birth, who Anne Marie told me was so aggressive that he was kept in a room on his own. When I saw him, he was lying apathetically on an old sofa and looking at me with the eyes of a frightened animal.
“All he understands is: “Stay here now!” Anne Marie told us, before pointing out some tiles in the bathroom he had allegedly smashed. My blood ran cold as she continued. “I don’t have strong enough medicine to keep him calm, so I am trying to move him to an old-age home that does.” Florin is given nothing to do and has no one to whom he can talk.
In another room, on an upper floor, there were about 10 shrunken forms in their beds; it was hard to tell their ages, but Anne Marie said they ranged from nine to 26 years old. It was 2pm on a gloriously sunny autumn day, but they were lying inert under grubby blankets, some tied to the bedstead with filthy tape. There were no wheelchairs or a lift; none of them had ever been outside; and the stench of urine and faeces was overwhelming.
How can such a place still exist more than 20 years after the horror of Romania’s orphanages and institutions was exposed to the world? They were supposed to have been closed down long ago. Stefan Darabus, country director of the charity Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), who accompanied on my visit last month and acted as translator, was as shocked and angry as I was.
“It will be the next one I close,” he promised. HHC is a charity founded in 1994 by Colonel Mark Cook, former commander of the British UN contingent in Croatia, and his wife Caroline, with the aim of removing children from institutional care and into family life. Stefan and colleagues are working their way around the country shutting these unspeakable places, but it is a slow process, not least because where do you put such betrayed and damaged children?
It is a tragedy of unspeakable proportions for so many that, during President Nicolae Ceausescu’s 25-year reign of terror, poverty-stricken parents were encouraged to hand over their children to the care of the state. He wanted to boost the population, with the aim of creating a “Citizen’s Army”. Contraception and abortion were banned, and women were told that having a large family was a patriotic duty. The result was that parents had more children than they could afford to feed. There was no real alternative than to place these unwanted babies in an institution.
Ceausescu’s regime fell following a bloody uprising in December 1989, and he and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas Day after a two-hour trial. It was only in the months following the revolution that appalling institutions, such as the one in Bistrita – run by untrained staff and short of food, medicine, heating fuel and compassion – were discovered and provoked outrage internationally. About 170,000 babies and children, most of them healthy but including the physically and mentally handicapped whose existence Ceausescu denied, had been crammed into around 700 “orphanages” – although the majority of children had parents who were alive.
When Romania began discussions to join the EU in the early Nineties, a key requirement was that these institutions be closed down, and the Romanian government agreed to do so.
In 2000, I visited Romania to report on what progress had been made. It was a traumatic trip and deeply disturbing to see the numbers of neglected, malnourished children with illnesses, such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and Aids. But I believed the assurances of the Romanian government that it aimed to have all state children’s homes closed within 10 years. By the time Romania joined the EU in 2007, I assumed that it was close to achieving this goal. What I found last month was that although some progress has been made – 450 institutions containing about 160,000 inmates have been shut down – Romania has still not eradicated its shameful past. The institution in Bistrita is one of 256 in which more than 10,800 children still languish.
The harsh reality is that shutting down an institution costs about £100,000. The EU has contributed around £36 million so far. Today, about 20 per cent of the cost is born by local councils and 80 per cent by the charity, HHC. It is also a lengthy process, taking a minimum of 18 months for suitable homes to be found for each child, with access to trained social workers and psychologists to help them work towards some sort of normal life.
In addition, efforts are made to trace the birth family of each child to see if they want to be involved; some families still have no idea where their children were taken or if they are still alive. About 35 per cent of children return to the parental home permanently. Children may also be placed in “small family homes” – a halfway house between an institution and foster care. Others, with support, are taken in by families. Adoption is a complex legal process, but there are about 14,500 foster carers currently looking after about 26,500 children. International adoptions were halted in 2007 for fear it was leading to trafficking and abuse (Between 600 and 700 children found homes in the UK).
There is also the challenging task of re-educating Romanians about the care of children and the value of family life. During my visit, I met Viorica, a neatly dressed mother of two teenage children in her early fifties, who was director of a Dickensian-type institution in Sighet for 120 babies until 2003. She was desperate to show me that change is possible although it wasn’t easy for her to talk about the past.
“I ran the institution like a hospital even though the babies weren’t necessarily ill,” she said. “They were fed and they slept. They never went outside. They had no toys, no opportunity to socialise or play. By the time they were three and ready to move to another institution, they couldn’t walk, talk or eat solid food. I had no interest in their psychological development and, for reasons I still don’t understand, I somehow totally disassociated the children in the institution from my own or others I knew outside.
“I was so convinced I was right that initially I fought against its closure because I genuinely couldn’t see an alternative. But the people from HHC argued with me over a two-year period about how children need families and love, and I gradually came to realise what a terrible place I had been running.”
For the past seven years, Viorica has been in charge of a mother-and-baby unit that helps mothers look after their children, an emergency centre for children who have been abused, a day-care centre for children whose mothers work, and four small family homes.
''All the time I try to make amends for what went before. I cuddle and love the children. I am so happy that the babies in my care now develop in the way they should.
“But I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself,” she added quietly, her face full of pain. “I constantly feel sad as well as guilty that I didn’t try to change the system much earlier.”
As for changing the attitude of the 21 million population at large, HHC has so far helped 1,500 “at risk” families, with between two and seven children, to stay together, offering support and help with childcare. It is an important but small inroad and an impossible task for any single charity to do on its own. The Romanian government should be ashamed that it is not, as it promised, making childcare a priority.
Andreea, a young mother whom the charity is currently supporting, lives in a tiny, concrete hut in the countryside with her two sons Petru, two, and four-month-old Stefan. Just 19, she is beautiful and perhaps, in another life she could have been a model. Instead, abandoned by her boyfriend, she lives in poverty. Her rented hut has no running water – she has to rely on a neighbour for supplies– and an outside lavatory. Inside, the ceiling is covered with cardboard and the bare concrete walls with strips of carpet that add colour but little insulation. There is a small log fire for warmth and basic cooking and one bed which she shares with her sons. The little boys were clean, bright-eyed and obviously loved. “I want my sons to stay with me,” she whispered, as she cuddled them close, “but I need help.”
“We will make sure she has enough wood for the winter and food for herself and her sons,” Stefan told me. “But we are worried she is too isolated. Her mother wants nothing to do with her because she had children out of wedlock, so we are trying to find other family members she could move closer to. The point is even if they are very poor, they are all together as a family.”
I looked at the sweet, smiling faces of Andreea’s sons and thought of the sad, dead-eyed youngsters I had seen in Bistrita and knew that no one could doubt what he said was true.
*Some names have been changed
Tragic case of mistaken identity
Many of the children I saw during my stay had a heart-rending story; but fate seems to have treated 28-year-old Sergio, a gentle, handsome, young man, desperately unfairly.
His mother abandoned him at birth because she couldn’t afford to feed him. He languished in hospital uncared for and unloved for two years until his parents unexpectedly turned up to claim him. But because of staff negligence and the lack of proper records, they were given another baby with the same first name. Sergio stayed in the hospital until he was four and was then moved to an institution of about 200 children. “It was grim,” he says. “But I wanted to be educated and worked hard at school.”
His birth mother brought up the other child along with her five children but, over the years, felt increasingly that he didn’t belong to her. She became so distraught about her relationship with her “son” that she hanged herself. The child grew up to be a criminal and is now in jail.
Despite his difficult upbringing, Sergio has always been positive and wanted something out of life. Statistically, about 40 per cent of children who leave institutions when they are 18 end up begging or turning to prostitution, but Sergio took a four-year degree in Catholic theology at a local university, funded by a full scholarship.
In his second year, he managed to trace his birth father who, he smiles, “looks just like me”.
“He told me about my mother, and I am so sorry I never met her.” The young man remains in touch with his father and siblings. His story does not yet have a happy ending as after his degree, fate struck again.
“Unfortunately,” he explains, “my ID has the same number as the child who was given to my parents by mistake. I couldn’t get work as employers thought I was a criminal.” Two years on, lawyers are still trying to sort out his case.
His personal life, however, is more stable. “I have a girlfriend who was in the institution with me and after four years together we have decided to get married sometime next year.
“But,” he sighs, “social and professional integration are very difficult when you’ve spent your life in an institution, and the risk of being a total failure is high. I have no money and live in a hostel but my girlfriend, who is studying to be a psychologist and also works in McDonald’s, is helping me financially.”
Learning to be part of the family
On my last visit to Romania in 2000, I came across Carmilia, a dark-eyed, five-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother, Ion, in a small family unit with eight other children. They had come from an institution and, when they arrived two years earlier, neither could speak or walk. Carmilia wasn’t toilet-trained, couldn’t hold a spoon or sit in a chair and was terrified of grass and running water. She would sit rocking back and forth in the way that seriously disturbed children do and was violent to anyone who approached her. She was utterly unaware of Ion, then an underdeveloped sickly baby. It took months of patient therapy to explain what a “family” was and that they were brother and sister. By the time I first met her, she had just began to hug him and proudly did so in front of me. She was such a sweet child that I had often wondered what had happened to her. Luckily, Carmilia could be traced and I went to see her.
She and Ion, now 15 and 14, currently live in another family unit in a quiet village an hour away from the northern town of Baia Mare. Both teenagers were waiting in the front garden when I arrived. “Good afternoon,” Carmilia smiled. “I have learnt a little English. Please come in.” She is small for her age, but there was an effervescent quality about her that was still captivating, while Ion remained more withdrawn.
The care worker in charge told me that Carmilia works hard at school and it is hoped she will be able to find a job and cope with a family of her own.
I asked if we could take photographs of them. They stood cheek to cheek, and she hugged him tight. I explained that the picture would be published in a newspaper and seen by hundreds of thousands of people. She beamed, but Ion suddenly looked crestfallen.
“Will I be seen by all those people, too?” he finally asked. He had no idea what a photograph was or indeed a newspaper. [2]
I asked Anne Marie, the director of the orphanage, where the seven-year-old slept as the room only had small cots. “In the corner cot,” she pointed with a shrug. “He can’t stretch out but that is all we have.” In her forties, she seemed to run the place with breathtaking complacency and little sign of relating to the children in her care. Most disturbing of all was the unsettling quiet. Babies, whose cries always go unanswered, soon fall silent. As they grow older, they rock back and forth, later they self-harm and become very aggressive.
So I could only begin to imagine what had happened to Florin, a 17-year-old boy abandoned at birth, who Anne Marie told me was so aggressive that he was kept in a room on his own. When I saw him, he was lying apathetically on an old sofa and looking at me with the eyes of a frightened animal.
“All he understands is: “Stay here now!” Anne Marie told us, before pointing out some tiles in the bathroom he had allegedly smashed. My blood ran cold as she continued. “I don’t have strong enough medicine to keep him calm, so I am trying to move him to an old-age home that does.” Florin is given nothing to do and has no one to whom he can talk.
In another room, on an upper floor, there were about 10 shrunken forms in their beds; it was hard to tell their ages, but Anne Marie said they ranged from nine to 26 years old. It was 2pm on a gloriously sunny autumn day, but they were lying inert under grubby blankets, some tied to the bedstead with filthy tape. There were no wheelchairs or a lift; none of them had ever been outside; and the stench of urine and faeces was overwhelming.
How can such a place still exist more than 20 years after the horror of Romania’s orphanages and institutions was exposed to the world? They were supposed to have been closed down long ago. Stefan Darabus, country director of the charity Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), who accompanied on my visit last month and acted as translator, was as shocked and angry as I was.
“It will be the next one I close,” he promised. HHC is a charity founded in 1994 by Colonel Mark Cook, former commander of the British UN contingent in Croatia, and his wife Caroline, with the aim of removing children from institutional care and into family life. Stefan and colleagues are working their way around the country shutting these unspeakable places, but it is a slow process, not least because where do you put such betrayed and damaged children?
It is a tragedy of unspeakable proportions for so many that, during President Nicolae Ceausescu’s 25-year reign of terror, poverty-stricken parents were encouraged to hand over their children to the care of the state. He wanted to boost the population, with the aim of creating a “Citizen’s Army”. Contraception and abortion were banned, and women were told that having a large family was a patriotic duty. The result was that parents had more children than they could afford to feed. There was no real alternative than to place these unwanted babies in an institution.
Ceausescu’s regime fell following a bloody uprising in December 1989, and he and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas Day after a two-hour trial. It was only in the months following the revolution that appalling institutions, such as the one in Bistrita – run by untrained staff and short of food, medicine, heating fuel and compassion – were discovered and provoked outrage internationally. About 170,000 babies and children, most of them healthy but including the physically and mentally handicapped whose existence Ceausescu denied, had been crammed into around 700 “orphanages” – although the majority of children had parents who were alive.
When Romania began discussions to join the EU in the early Nineties, a key requirement was that these institutions be closed down, and the Romanian government agreed to do so.
In 2000, I visited Romania to report on what progress had been made. It was a traumatic trip and deeply disturbing to see the numbers of neglected, malnourished children with illnesses, such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and Aids. But I believed the assurances of the Romanian government that it aimed to have all state children’s homes closed within 10 years. By the time Romania joined the EU in 2007, I assumed that it was close to achieving this goal. What I found last month was that although some progress has been made – 450 institutions containing about 160,000 inmates have been shut down – Romania has still not eradicated its shameful past. The institution in Bistrita is one of 256 in which more than 10,800 children still languish.
The harsh reality is that shutting down an institution costs about £100,000. The EU has contributed around £36 million so far. Today, about 20 per cent of the cost is born by local councils and 80 per cent by the charity, HHC. It is also a lengthy process, taking a minimum of 18 months for suitable homes to be found for each child, with access to trained social workers and psychologists to help them work towards some sort of normal life.
In addition, efforts are made to trace the birth family of each child to see if they want to be involved; some families still have no idea where their children were taken or if they are still alive. About 35 per cent of children return to the parental home permanently. Children may also be placed in “small family homes” – a halfway house between an institution and foster care. Others, with support, are taken in by families. Adoption is a complex legal process, but there are about 14,500 foster carers currently looking after about 26,500 children. International adoptions were halted in 2007 for fear it was leading to trafficking and abuse (Between 600 and 700 children found homes in the UK).
There is also the challenging task of re-educating Romanians about the care of children and the value of family life. During my visit, I met Viorica, a neatly dressed mother of two teenage children in her early fifties, who was director of a Dickensian-type institution in Sighet for 120 babies until 2003. She was desperate to show me that change is possible although it wasn’t easy for her to talk about the past.
“I ran the institution like a hospital even though the babies weren’t necessarily ill,” she said. “They were fed and they slept. They never went outside. They had no toys, no opportunity to socialise or play. By the time they were three and ready to move to another institution, they couldn’t walk, talk or eat solid food. I had no interest in their psychological development and, for reasons I still don’t understand, I somehow totally disassociated the children in the institution from my own or others I knew outside.
“I was so convinced I was right that initially I fought against its closure because I genuinely couldn’t see an alternative. But the people from HHC argued with me over a two-year period about how children need families and love, and I gradually came to realise what a terrible place I had been running.”
For the past seven years, Viorica has been in charge of a mother-and-baby unit that helps mothers look after their children, an emergency centre for children who have been abused, a day-care centre for children whose mothers work, and four small family homes.
''All the time I try to make amends for what went before. I cuddle and love the children. I am so happy that the babies in my care now develop in the way they should.
“But I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself,” she added quietly, her face full of pain. “I constantly feel sad as well as guilty that I didn’t try to change the system much earlier.”
As for changing the attitude of the 21 million population at large, HHC has so far helped 1,500 “at risk” families, with between two and seven children, to stay together, offering support and help with childcare. It is an important but small inroad and an impossible task for any single charity to do on its own. The Romanian government should be ashamed that it is not, as it promised, making childcare a priority.
Andreea, a young mother whom the charity is currently supporting, lives in a tiny, concrete hut in the countryside with her two sons Petru, two, and four-month-old Stefan. Just 19, she is beautiful and perhaps, in another life she could have been a model. Instead, abandoned by her boyfriend, she lives in poverty. Her rented hut has no running water – she has to rely on a neighbour for supplies– and an outside lavatory. Inside, the ceiling is covered with cardboard and the bare concrete walls with strips of carpet that add colour but little insulation. There is a small log fire for warmth and basic cooking and one bed which she shares with her sons. The little boys were clean, bright-eyed and obviously loved. “I want my sons to stay with me,” she whispered, as she cuddled them close, “but I need help.”
“We will make sure she has enough wood for the winter and food for herself and her sons,” Stefan told me. “But we are worried she is too isolated. Her mother wants nothing to do with her because she had children out of wedlock, so we are trying to find other family members she could move closer to. The point is even if they are very poor, they are all together as a family.”
I looked at the sweet, smiling faces of Andreea’s sons and thought of the sad, dead-eyed youngsters I had seen in Bistrita and knew that no one could doubt what he said was true.
*Some names have been changed
Tragic case of mistaken identity
Many of the children I saw during my stay had a heart-rending story; but fate seems to have treated 28-year-old Sergio, a gentle, handsome, young man, desperately unfairly.
His mother abandoned him at birth because she couldn’t afford to feed him. He languished in hospital uncared for and unloved for two years until his parents unexpectedly turned up to claim him. But because of staff negligence and the lack of proper records, they were given another baby with the same first name. Sergio stayed in the hospital until he was four and was then moved to an institution of about 200 children. “It was grim,” he says. “But I wanted to be educated and worked hard at school.”
His birth mother brought up the other child along with her five children but, over the years, felt increasingly that he didn’t belong to her. She became so distraught about her relationship with her “son” that she hanged herself. The child grew up to be a criminal and is now in jail.
Despite his difficult upbringing, Sergio has always been positive and wanted something out of life. Statistically, about 40 per cent of children who leave institutions when they are 18 end up begging or turning to prostitution, but Sergio took a four-year degree in Catholic theology at a local university, funded by a full scholarship.
In his second year, he managed to trace his birth father who, he smiles, “looks just like me”.
“He told me about my mother, and I am so sorry I never met her.” The young man remains in touch with his father and siblings. His story does not yet have a happy ending as after his degree, fate struck again.
“Unfortunately,” he explains, “my ID has the same number as the child who was given to my parents by mistake. I couldn’t get work as employers thought I was a criminal.” Two years on, lawyers are still trying to sort out his case.
His personal life, however, is more stable. “I have a girlfriend who was in the institution with me and after four years together we have decided to get married sometime next year.
“But,” he sighs, “social and professional integration are very difficult when you’ve spent your life in an institution, and the risk of being a total failure is high. I have no money and live in a hostel but my girlfriend, who is studying to be a psychologist and also works in McDonald’s, is helping me financially.”
Learning to be part of the family
On my last visit to Romania in 2000, I came across Carmilia, a dark-eyed, five-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother, Ion, in a small family unit with eight other children. They had come from an institution and, when they arrived two years earlier, neither could speak or walk. Carmilia wasn’t toilet-trained, couldn’t hold a spoon or sit in a chair and was terrified of grass and running water. She would sit rocking back and forth in the way that seriously disturbed children do and was violent to anyone who approached her. She was utterly unaware of Ion, then an underdeveloped sickly baby. It took months of patient therapy to explain what a “family” was and that they were brother and sister. By the time I first met her, she had just began to hug him and proudly did so in front of me. She was such a sweet child that I had often wondered what had happened to her. Luckily, Carmilia could be traced and I went to see her.
She and Ion, now 15 and 14, currently live in another family unit in a quiet village an hour away from the northern town of Baia Mare. Both teenagers were waiting in the front garden when I arrived. “Good afternoon,” Carmilia smiled. “I have learnt a little English. Please come in.” She is small for her age, but there was an effervescent quality about her that was still captivating, while Ion remained more withdrawn.
The care worker in charge told me that Carmilia works hard at school and it is hoped she will be able to find a job and cope with a family of her own.
I asked if we could take photographs of them. They stood cheek to cheek, and she hugged him tight. I explained that the picture would be published in a newspaper and seen by hundreds of thousands of people. She beamed, but Ion suddenly looked crestfallen.
“Will I be seen by all those people, too?” he finally asked. He had no idea what a photograph was or indeed a newspaper. [2]
'Irecuperabilă' - The irrecuperable
Why does abuse persist in Romania?
by Luke Dale-Harris for 'New Internationalist Magazine'
November 2013 - Twenty-three years after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, when harrowing images from Romanian institutions shocked the world, Luke Dale-Harris reports on campaigners’ ongoing fight for disabled rights.
The footage is shaky and out of focus, as if shot in a hurry, but the situation in this Romanian care home is clear. Young men lie buckled in children’s cots, their limbs contorted with disuse and atrophy, tied to the metal bars with bits of ripped-up old bed sheets. One struggles violently to free himself, another lies face down and motionless, a cord tied round his shoulders fastening him in place. Around the room cots line the walls, back to back. Their occupants are doubled up and emaciated, some rocking back and forth, others hidden under blankets. As the camera pans, they stare blankly into the lens. No-one is making a sound.
This is the Gheorghe Serban Social Care Centre in Bucharest, a government-run institution holding 57 people with varying degrees of mental and physical disability. Set in an old orphanage, it is reminiscent of the darker days of Romanian history, when institutions like this were common in hundreds of towns and villages across the country, keeping those deemed unfit for Ceausescu’s Romania firmly out of sight and barely alive. Twenty-three years on, Romania is now a liberal democracy and an EU member state, and the days of orphanages and asylums are officially over. Yet this footage was shot in May 2013. Here, and in many other institutions across the country, little has changed.
Endemic neglect
The video comes amid a campaign, led by three NGOs, to end human rights violations in Romanian care centres. They claim the footage actually shows the Gheorghe Serban Centre at its best, tidied up for the camera. ‘This is a strategy we see all the time,’ says Georgiana Pascu at the Romania Centre for Legal Resources (RCLR). ‘They clean up, throw open the windows and then sedate the patients so they cannot speak to the camera and answer questions.’ Her report chimes with that of a former nurse at Gheorghe Serban, who recently reported that...
‘young adults are always kept in the dark… sometimes beaten, sometimes screamed at.’
These conditions, under the European convention, amount to torture and breach EU law.
Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) exposed filthy and degrading conditions in Romania’s institutions in January 2006.
Yet the authorities have denied any wrongdoing and, unbelievably, directed the blame back to the NGOs. They have accused them of ‘damaging the reputation of Romanian institutions’ and claim that ‘the centre’s arrangement and living conditions and medical rehabilitation meet the standards in power’. In response, they have barred any outsiders, including NGO workers, from entering the institution. As far as the government is concerned, the case is closed.
But Gheorghe Serban does not exist in isolation. ‘The authorities are very eager to cover up this case, not because it is an anomaly, but because it is in Bucharest,’ says Pascu. ‘Institutions like this are normally found in the countryside or in small towns where they can be forgotten. To have one exposed in the capital city is very embarrassing for the government.’
Indeed, denial and dissimulation have been constants of the Romanian government’s approach to disability. A dearth of public records and individual documentation means that reliable statistics on how many people remain institutionalized are near impossible to come by. Even the exact number of institutions is unknown. Official figures put the number of disabled people living in care centres at around 17,000, while NGO estimates come close to three times that figure.
People who don’t exist
In 2006, Disability International reported that 9,000 babies were abandoned each year, largely due to birth defects. Of these, nearly 50 per cent have no documentation or identification, meaning they enter the state care system off the record. All around Romania, people who were never officially born are living in institutions that don’t officially exist.
Even where institutions are on the record, the division of responsibility is extremely complex, often split between various government ministries, local authorities and private companies or charities. No single authority or policy can be held accountable, making both campaigning for better conditions and legal action profoundly difficult. In the case of the Gheorghe Serban Centre every politician that the RCLR contacted, including Prime Minister Victor Ponta, declared that they were not in a position to act on disability issues. ‘It’s like a state within a state,’ says Pascu. ‘Because of this, the government is almost inviolable to any pressure.’
This may explain, in part, why conditions in Romanian institutions remain among the worst in the world, despite the country’s accession to the EU, its ratifying of the UN Convention for Disabled People and huge pressure from international NGOs. In reality, the problem runs much deeper, embedded in a stubborn prejudice among Romanians against people with disabilities, and manifested in a state intent on the privatization of care services. With only 19 per cent of the country’s public funds directed towards social services – by far the lowest in Europe – and only a fraction of that spent on people with disabilities, much of the work has to be carried out by charities and NGOs.
‘The reliance on NGOs and charities should have been a transitional phase after Romania emerged from communism,’ says Andreia Moraru of the Academic Network of European Disability Experts. ‘We need radical reform in the public sector and for this we need democratic pressure. Everything else is just window dressing while the problem continues.’
But public pressure to reform is a long way off. For the majority of Romanians, the idea of rights and social inclusion for the disabled is still a foreign concept, at odds with a culture that has long cast them as varsa (weeds). ‘Romanians don’t think of disabled people as human beings,’ explains Moraru. ‘They can’t conceive that they feel pain like the rest of us. They don’t believe they can improve, even the ones with low- or mid-level disabilities.’
Prejudice runs deep
This attitude is rooted deep in Romanian history. Disability was fundamentally at odds with Ceausescu’s understanding of communist ideology, which was based on a social vision of the ‘New Man’ where imperfections were not admitted. By the time the dictator fell in late 1989 over a 100,000 disabled children and adults were locked away, with thousands more living in sewers, city parks and on the beaches of the Black Sea.
When Western journalists descended, Romanian orphanages and care centres became infamous across the world, conjuring up images of half-starved children locked in dark rooms. A flood of aid dollars and hundreds of charity workers followed. But amid the ruins of the Romanian state the work they could do was limited. In the years that followed, as the country adjusted to its capitalist future and the aid money began to run dry, hundreds of institutions remained, unchanged and forgotten.
Since Romania’s accession into the EU in 2007, things have gradually improved. New care centres have been built, smaller and better equipped than their predecessors, and laws have been introduced to prevent the institutionalization of children with only minor disabilities.
But it will take more than legislation to change such long-standing prejudice. Until Romanians are ready to accept disabled people as legitimate members of their society, they will continue to be kept behind closed doors, whether in institutions or at home. [1]
The footage is shaky and out of focus, as if shot in a hurry, but the situation in this Romanian care home is clear. Young men lie buckled in children’s cots, their limbs contorted with disuse and atrophy, tied to the metal bars with bits of ripped-up old bed sheets. One struggles violently to free himself, another lies face down and motionless, a cord tied round his shoulders fastening him in place. Around the room cots line the walls, back to back. Their occupants are doubled up and emaciated, some rocking back and forth, others hidden under blankets. As the camera pans, they stare blankly into the lens. No-one is making a sound.
This is the Gheorghe Serban Social Care Centre in Bucharest, a government-run institution holding 57 people with varying degrees of mental and physical disability. Set in an old orphanage, it is reminiscent of the darker days of Romanian history, when institutions like this were common in hundreds of towns and villages across the country, keeping those deemed unfit for Ceausescu’s Romania firmly out of sight and barely alive. Twenty-three years on, Romania is now a liberal democracy and an EU member state, and the days of orphanages and asylums are officially over. Yet this footage was shot in May 2013. Here, and in many other institutions across the country, little has changed.
Endemic neglect
The video comes amid a campaign, led by three NGOs, to end human rights violations in Romanian care centres. They claim the footage actually shows the Gheorghe Serban Centre at its best, tidied up for the camera. ‘This is a strategy we see all the time,’ says Georgiana Pascu at the Romania Centre for Legal Resources (RCLR). ‘They clean up, throw open the windows and then sedate the patients so they cannot speak to the camera and answer questions.’ Her report chimes with that of a former nurse at Gheorghe Serban, who recently reported that...
‘young adults are always kept in the dark… sometimes beaten, sometimes screamed at.’
These conditions, under the European convention, amount to torture and breach EU law.
Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) exposed filthy and degrading conditions in Romania’s institutions in January 2006.
Yet the authorities have denied any wrongdoing and, unbelievably, directed the blame back to the NGOs. They have accused them of ‘damaging the reputation of Romanian institutions’ and claim that ‘the centre’s arrangement and living conditions and medical rehabilitation meet the standards in power’. In response, they have barred any outsiders, including NGO workers, from entering the institution. As far as the government is concerned, the case is closed.
But Gheorghe Serban does not exist in isolation. ‘The authorities are very eager to cover up this case, not because it is an anomaly, but because it is in Bucharest,’ says Pascu. ‘Institutions like this are normally found in the countryside or in small towns where they can be forgotten. To have one exposed in the capital city is very embarrassing for the government.’
Indeed, denial and dissimulation have been constants of the Romanian government’s approach to disability. A dearth of public records and individual documentation means that reliable statistics on how many people remain institutionalized are near impossible to come by. Even the exact number of institutions is unknown. Official figures put the number of disabled people living in care centres at around 17,000, while NGO estimates come close to three times that figure.
People who don’t exist
In 2006, Disability International reported that 9,000 babies were abandoned each year, largely due to birth defects. Of these, nearly 50 per cent have no documentation or identification, meaning they enter the state care system off the record. All around Romania, people who were never officially born are living in institutions that don’t officially exist.
Even where institutions are on the record, the division of responsibility is extremely complex, often split between various government ministries, local authorities and private companies or charities. No single authority or policy can be held accountable, making both campaigning for better conditions and legal action profoundly difficult. In the case of the Gheorghe Serban Centre every politician that the RCLR contacted, including Prime Minister Victor Ponta, declared that they were not in a position to act on disability issues. ‘It’s like a state within a state,’ says Pascu. ‘Because of this, the government is almost inviolable to any pressure.’
This may explain, in part, why conditions in Romanian institutions remain among the worst in the world, despite the country’s accession to the EU, its ratifying of the UN Convention for Disabled People and huge pressure from international NGOs. In reality, the problem runs much deeper, embedded in a stubborn prejudice among Romanians against people with disabilities, and manifested in a state intent on the privatization of care services. With only 19 per cent of the country’s public funds directed towards social services – by far the lowest in Europe – and only a fraction of that spent on people with disabilities, much of the work has to be carried out by charities and NGOs.
‘The reliance on NGOs and charities should have been a transitional phase after Romania emerged from communism,’ says Andreia Moraru of the Academic Network of European Disability Experts. ‘We need radical reform in the public sector and for this we need democratic pressure. Everything else is just window dressing while the problem continues.’
But public pressure to reform is a long way off. For the majority of Romanians, the idea of rights and social inclusion for the disabled is still a foreign concept, at odds with a culture that has long cast them as varsa (weeds). ‘Romanians don’t think of disabled people as human beings,’ explains Moraru. ‘They can’t conceive that they feel pain like the rest of us. They don’t believe they can improve, even the ones with low- or mid-level disabilities.’
Prejudice runs deep
This attitude is rooted deep in Romanian history. Disability was fundamentally at odds with Ceausescu’s understanding of communist ideology, which was based on a social vision of the ‘New Man’ where imperfections were not admitted. By the time the dictator fell in late 1989 over a 100,000 disabled children and adults were locked away, with thousands more living in sewers, city parks and on the beaches of the Black Sea.
When Western journalists descended, Romanian orphanages and care centres became infamous across the world, conjuring up images of half-starved children locked in dark rooms. A flood of aid dollars and hundreds of charity workers followed. But amid the ruins of the Romanian state the work they could do was limited. In the years that followed, as the country adjusted to its capitalist future and the aid money began to run dry, hundreds of institutions remained, unchanged and forgotten.
Since Romania’s accession into the EU in 2007, things have gradually improved. New care centres have been built, smaller and better equipped than their predecessors, and laws have been introduced to prevent the institutionalization of children with only minor disabilities.
But it will take more than legislation to change such long-standing prejudice. Until Romanians are ready to accept disabled people as legitimate members of their society, they will continue to be kept behind closed doors, whether in institutions or at home. [1]
Europe's hidden shame
17 April 2014 - An undercover investigation by Al Jazeera reveals disturbing evidence about the abuse of disabled people in Romania.
Romania has been a member of the European Union since 2007. It says it’s committed to the care of some of its most vulnerable citizens – disabled people. But People & Power has uncovered highly disturbing evidence about systematic abuse in the country’s state institutions.
How do the state authorities explain this – and why has the EU spent millions of Euros refurbishing and modernizing state centres for the disabled?
By Sarah Spiller - I’d been warned what to expect, but nothing prepared me.
In a residential centre for disabled people, 10 women were sharing a squalid room reeking of urine. Two residents began crying. They said they’d been "punished" by staff, beaten because they’d refused to have their heads shaved.
I’d come to Romania in winter, 2013, to learn more about the supposed progress the country has made when it came to the treatment of some of its most vulnerable citizens -- the thousands of disabled people in residential state care.
Since Romania joined the EU in 2007, the country has ratified a key United Nations treaty affirming the rights of people with disabilities. It’s announced a "national strategy" to promote the rights and dignity of all disabled people. And the Romanian constitution has stipulated that the disabled should have "special protection".
But what I was seeing seemed utterly at odds with these public declarations.
Nearly 25 years since the downfall of Communism here, for some in this country’s notorious institutions, time has appeared to have stood still.
Undercover
We returned to Romania, undercover, in the spring. One of our first meetings, on the outskirts of Romania’s capital Bucharest. A contact wanted to show us images of life inside Romanian institutions. We were shown film, taken secretly inside centres all around the country, over the last two years.
The footage was deeply disturbing.
At an institution in central Romania for over 200 adults, disabled residents lay seemingly motionless in over-crowded rooms. Down one corridor, was a room known as an "isolator," a place where apparently the most ill people were placed.
A man was asked if people had died there.
“Many,” he replied. “That’s how it is.”
Then there were the allegations of assault. At a centre for "recuperation and rehabilitation", disabled residents were too afraid to speak inside. But outside, they complained of violence and abuse -- and they pleaded for help.
"They sedate us and shave our heads," cried one resident. "The staff beat us. It's very bad in here. Please help me -- please."
Back in the city centre, down a quiet side street, we visited a charity that’s been monitoring conditions inside Romania’s institutions for the disabled since 2003.
Georgiana Pascu of the Centre for Legal Resources told us that human rights violations had got worse in the 10 years they’d been visiting state centres.
"These abuses will continue," she told us. "This is our perspective at 10 years monitoring these institutions. They will not stop."
The evidence we were gathering suggested serious failings in state institutions for disabled people.
Then we discovered what appeared to be a new initiative on the part of state authorities: A plan to enlist theprivate sector to look after disabled people.
A document on the Internet outlined how residents at a state institution in Bucharest would be transferred to a private centre in the countryside. Further research suggested state officials were prepared to pay around 600 Euros, per person, per month, for people’s care there.
On the Internet, too, was a promotional film for the private institution, the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza Foundation". It offered comfortable, modern facilities and good care for residents.
When we visited this place undercover, the reality could not have been more different.
The centre for over 50 disabled people was in an isolated village in the county of Buzau.
At first sight, the place seemed clean, clinical even. But behind the barred windows of an "orange pavilion" we found young people sedated and distressed.
On either side of a corridor were locked doors. Behind one door were six youngsters in three beds. Their heads had been shaved, and their jumpers tied at the sleeves. Some seemed thin and malnourished.
"They are people with disabilities," a staff member informed us. "At the doctor’s recommendation, they’re tied up for periods of time. They suffer from autism. They eat from the bin."
She gestured to one young woman sitting rocking on a bed. "If you want to see, we can untie her. She will go straight to the bin and eat everything she finds."
We saw another locked door. Staff said this was a "seclusion room", and at first they denied there was anybody in there. But when they turned the key, inside was a young man. He was concealed under the covers and appeared to be shaking. He’d had an epileptic seizure. He’d apparently been locked in without any medical supervision.
A hidden report
This was a private centre – but what, we wondered, did the authorities know about conditions inside their own state institutions?
Quite a lot, we discovered.
In fact, the authorities here had carried out inspections into scores of centres for "rehabilitation and recuperation" last summer.
Their findings: disabled residents were not fed or clothed adequately. Staff didn’t respect guidelines to protect vulnerable people from abuse and neglect. In numerous institutions, there were few activities and therapies.
But this report was kept quiet. It didn’t appear on the government’s website. It was only when the charity the Centre for Legal Resources found out about these inspections that the report came to light.
Even then, we discovered that for some, months after the inspectors' visits, little had improved.
Inspectors found some of the worst conditions in the centre outside Bucharest, where 10 women shared one room. Weeks after the government’s findings, a disabled man was seen wandering half-naked in the grounds. When we visited undercover, residents were continuing to live in overcrowded conditions – and complaining of assault.
Armed with the government report and with our evidence from institutions all over the country, we went to Romania’s ministry of labour, responsible for people with disabilities. What did it make of the suggestion that the abuse of disabled people in this country had got worse over the past decade – since Romania joined the EU?
The ministry's Sec. of State Codrin Scutaru told us he was "outraged". He made a flurry of promises. He would find out more about what was happening. He'd publish the government report.
Then Sec. Scutaru suddenly came up with a new policy on the spot: He’d send government inspectors into institutions for disabled people, all over Romania, to gather complaints.
"This idea came to me today," he told us. "By talking to you. Thanks to you. You gave me the idea today."
But whilst all this seemed positive, welcome even, walking away from the labour ministry and past EU flags proudly fluttering over official buildings, we had one more question about Romania's care for the disabled that went beyond this EU member state.
EU millions
Since 2007, when Romania joined the EU, the country has received millions of Euros in EU aid to help people with disabilities live independently in their communities.
So how well has that money been spent?
We visited a think-tank in Bucharest that’s carried out painstaking research into where EU funds have gone. It’s discovered that nearly 30 million Euros that could have been spent on helping disabled people live independent lives, has instead been spent on renovating over 50 state institutions for people with disabilities.
"What EU money could have done was to try and give people a chance to live in the community," said Elena Tudose from the Institute for Public Policy. "Romania has used the money in the very opposite sense. We've used the money for changing the windows, painting the walls."
Of even more concern were reports we'd heard that some of the EU money may have gone into institutions where there were allegations of abuse. We'd heard about one such centre in the county of Giurgiu called Tantava, modernized using EU aid of over half a million Euros.
Romania not alone
Dr. Cerasela Predescu’s charity, Pro-Act, helps disabled people move out of institutions to live independent lives in the community. She took us to one of the charity's community houses in Giurgiu.
Over home-made cakes, we met former residents of Tantava who told us their lives have been transformed since they left the state centre. They were able to look for work, to enjoy the most basic freedoms, and to look towards the future. With considerable courage, they also told us about the Tantava centre, and the violence and abuse they said disabled residents suffered, even as money poured in from Brussels.
"People were left to be tied up. To be beaten or injected, or medicated, claiming the doctor said so," one former resident said. "I want all institutions, all centres, closed."
"We can’t shut our eyes, knowing that people are not respected," Dr. Predescu told us. "The fact is they put money into Tantava and other institutions like Tantava. As long as they do that, nothing changes."
'Rome not built in a day'
During our research, we'd discovered that Romania wasn't the only member state to have used millions of Euros in EU funding to renovate state institutions for the disabled.
A disability charity in the UK has uncovered evidence suggesting that around 150 million Euros in EU funding has been spent on modernizing state institutions for disabled people in Romania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovakia.
Given EU policy about disabled people living independent lives, had something gone wrong?
At an EU office looking out on the Brussels skyline, European Commissioner Johannes Hahn considered the question: "To be honest," he said, 'Rome was also not built in one day.'
When it came to money given to member states for the disabled, the EU said it has had to improve living conditions first.
"It’s apparently not possible to resolve the problem so fast that all the people can be getting out of institutions." In the future, he said, they will impose tougher conditions about how EU funding is used.
But was the commissioner concerned that EU money has gone into institutions in Romania, where there may have been human rights abuses?
His department, he said, was not aware of this. If there was evidence he said he would certainly follow up on it.
We gave the commissioner a list of over 50 state institutions that received EU money. Would he look into whether there had been human rights abuses at these centres for disabled people?
He said he would.
A few days later an EU official got in touch with us. They'd asked the Romanian authorities to look into conditions inside the EU-funded Tantava institution.
Then, a week before our programme was due to air, an EU official appeared on Romanian TV and said that in the future, EU funds would be put into helping disabled people live independently, rather than renovating Romanian state institutions.
Back in Romania, there appeared to be movement, too.
Local inspectors had visited the private centre in the county of Buzau – the place where young disabled people had been tied up behind locked doors. Sec. Scutaru emailed us with their findings. Officials had found no "specific procedure" for the restraint and isolation of residents.
And more news from an official in Bucharest. Disabled youngsters at this private home were to be moved again. To another Romanian state institution. [3]
Romania has been a member of the European Union since 2007. It says it’s committed to the care of some of its most vulnerable citizens – disabled people. But People & Power has uncovered highly disturbing evidence about systematic abuse in the country’s state institutions.
How do the state authorities explain this – and why has the EU spent millions of Euros refurbishing and modernizing state centres for the disabled?
By Sarah Spiller - I’d been warned what to expect, but nothing prepared me.
In a residential centre for disabled people, 10 women were sharing a squalid room reeking of urine. Two residents began crying. They said they’d been "punished" by staff, beaten because they’d refused to have their heads shaved.
I’d come to Romania in winter, 2013, to learn more about the supposed progress the country has made when it came to the treatment of some of its most vulnerable citizens -- the thousands of disabled people in residential state care.
Since Romania joined the EU in 2007, the country has ratified a key United Nations treaty affirming the rights of people with disabilities. It’s announced a "national strategy" to promote the rights and dignity of all disabled people. And the Romanian constitution has stipulated that the disabled should have "special protection".
But what I was seeing seemed utterly at odds with these public declarations.
Nearly 25 years since the downfall of Communism here, for some in this country’s notorious institutions, time has appeared to have stood still.
Undercover
We returned to Romania, undercover, in the spring. One of our first meetings, on the outskirts of Romania’s capital Bucharest. A contact wanted to show us images of life inside Romanian institutions. We were shown film, taken secretly inside centres all around the country, over the last two years.
The footage was deeply disturbing.
At an institution in central Romania for over 200 adults, disabled residents lay seemingly motionless in over-crowded rooms. Down one corridor, was a room known as an "isolator," a place where apparently the most ill people were placed.
A man was asked if people had died there.
“Many,” he replied. “That’s how it is.”
Then there were the allegations of assault. At a centre for "recuperation and rehabilitation", disabled residents were too afraid to speak inside. But outside, they complained of violence and abuse -- and they pleaded for help.
"They sedate us and shave our heads," cried one resident. "The staff beat us. It's very bad in here. Please help me -- please."
Back in the city centre, down a quiet side street, we visited a charity that’s been monitoring conditions inside Romania’s institutions for the disabled since 2003.
Georgiana Pascu of the Centre for Legal Resources told us that human rights violations had got worse in the 10 years they’d been visiting state centres.
"These abuses will continue," she told us. "This is our perspective at 10 years monitoring these institutions. They will not stop."
The evidence we were gathering suggested serious failings in state institutions for disabled people.
Then we discovered what appeared to be a new initiative on the part of state authorities: A plan to enlist theprivate sector to look after disabled people.
A document on the Internet outlined how residents at a state institution in Bucharest would be transferred to a private centre in the countryside. Further research suggested state officials were prepared to pay around 600 Euros, per person, per month, for people’s care there.
On the Internet, too, was a promotional film for the private institution, the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza Foundation". It offered comfortable, modern facilities and good care for residents.
When we visited this place undercover, the reality could not have been more different.
The centre for over 50 disabled people was in an isolated village in the county of Buzau.
At first sight, the place seemed clean, clinical even. But behind the barred windows of an "orange pavilion" we found young people sedated and distressed.
On either side of a corridor were locked doors. Behind one door were six youngsters in three beds. Their heads had been shaved, and their jumpers tied at the sleeves. Some seemed thin and malnourished.
"They are people with disabilities," a staff member informed us. "At the doctor’s recommendation, they’re tied up for periods of time. They suffer from autism. They eat from the bin."
She gestured to one young woman sitting rocking on a bed. "If you want to see, we can untie her. She will go straight to the bin and eat everything she finds."
We saw another locked door. Staff said this was a "seclusion room", and at first they denied there was anybody in there. But when they turned the key, inside was a young man. He was concealed under the covers and appeared to be shaking. He’d had an epileptic seizure. He’d apparently been locked in without any medical supervision.
A hidden report
This was a private centre – but what, we wondered, did the authorities know about conditions inside their own state institutions?
Quite a lot, we discovered.
In fact, the authorities here had carried out inspections into scores of centres for "rehabilitation and recuperation" last summer.
Their findings: disabled residents were not fed or clothed adequately. Staff didn’t respect guidelines to protect vulnerable people from abuse and neglect. In numerous institutions, there were few activities and therapies.
But this report was kept quiet. It didn’t appear on the government’s website. It was only when the charity the Centre for Legal Resources found out about these inspections that the report came to light.
Even then, we discovered that for some, months after the inspectors' visits, little had improved.
Inspectors found some of the worst conditions in the centre outside Bucharest, where 10 women shared one room. Weeks after the government’s findings, a disabled man was seen wandering half-naked in the grounds. When we visited undercover, residents were continuing to live in overcrowded conditions – and complaining of assault.
Armed with the government report and with our evidence from institutions all over the country, we went to Romania’s ministry of labour, responsible for people with disabilities. What did it make of the suggestion that the abuse of disabled people in this country had got worse over the past decade – since Romania joined the EU?
The ministry's Sec. of State Codrin Scutaru told us he was "outraged". He made a flurry of promises. He would find out more about what was happening. He'd publish the government report.
Then Sec. Scutaru suddenly came up with a new policy on the spot: He’d send government inspectors into institutions for disabled people, all over Romania, to gather complaints.
"This idea came to me today," he told us. "By talking to you. Thanks to you. You gave me the idea today."
But whilst all this seemed positive, welcome even, walking away from the labour ministry and past EU flags proudly fluttering over official buildings, we had one more question about Romania's care for the disabled that went beyond this EU member state.
EU millions
Since 2007, when Romania joined the EU, the country has received millions of Euros in EU aid to help people with disabilities live independently in their communities.
So how well has that money been spent?
We visited a think-tank in Bucharest that’s carried out painstaking research into where EU funds have gone. It’s discovered that nearly 30 million Euros that could have been spent on helping disabled people live independent lives, has instead been spent on renovating over 50 state institutions for people with disabilities.
"What EU money could have done was to try and give people a chance to live in the community," said Elena Tudose from the Institute for Public Policy. "Romania has used the money in the very opposite sense. We've used the money for changing the windows, painting the walls."
Of even more concern were reports we'd heard that some of the EU money may have gone into institutions where there were allegations of abuse. We'd heard about one such centre in the county of Giurgiu called Tantava, modernized using EU aid of over half a million Euros.
Romania not alone
Dr. Cerasela Predescu’s charity, Pro-Act, helps disabled people move out of institutions to live independent lives in the community. She took us to one of the charity's community houses in Giurgiu.
Over home-made cakes, we met former residents of Tantava who told us their lives have been transformed since they left the state centre. They were able to look for work, to enjoy the most basic freedoms, and to look towards the future. With considerable courage, they also told us about the Tantava centre, and the violence and abuse they said disabled residents suffered, even as money poured in from Brussels.
"People were left to be tied up. To be beaten or injected, or medicated, claiming the doctor said so," one former resident said. "I want all institutions, all centres, closed."
"We can’t shut our eyes, knowing that people are not respected," Dr. Predescu told us. "The fact is they put money into Tantava and other institutions like Tantava. As long as they do that, nothing changes."
'Rome not built in a day'
During our research, we'd discovered that Romania wasn't the only member state to have used millions of Euros in EU funding to renovate state institutions for the disabled.
A disability charity in the UK has uncovered evidence suggesting that around 150 million Euros in EU funding has been spent on modernizing state institutions for disabled people in Romania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovakia.
Given EU policy about disabled people living independent lives, had something gone wrong?
At an EU office looking out on the Brussels skyline, European Commissioner Johannes Hahn considered the question: "To be honest," he said, 'Rome was also not built in one day.'
When it came to money given to member states for the disabled, the EU said it has had to improve living conditions first.
"It’s apparently not possible to resolve the problem so fast that all the people can be getting out of institutions." In the future, he said, they will impose tougher conditions about how EU funding is used.
But was the commissioner concerned that EU money has gone into institutions in Romania, where there may have been human rights abuses?
His department, he said, was not aware of this. If there was evidence he said he would certainly follow up on it.
We gave the commissioner a list of over 50 state institutions that received EU money. Would he look into whether there had been human rights abuses at these centres for disabled people?
He said he would.
A few days later an EU official got in touch with us. They'd asked the Romanian authorities to look into conditions inside the EU-funded Tantava institution.
Then, a week before our programme was due to air, an EU official appeared on Romanian TV and said that in the future, EU funds would be put into helping disabled people live independently, rather than renovating Romanian state institutions.
Back in Romania, there appeared to be movement, too.
Local inspectors had visited the private centre in the county of Buzau – the place where young disabled people had been tied up behind locked doors. Sec. Scutaru emailed us with their findings. Officials had found no "specific procedure" for the restraint and isolation of residents.
And more news from an official in Bucharest. Disabled youngsters at this private home were to be moved again. To another Romanian state institution. [3]
According to the Mental Disability Advocacy Center (MDAC) [4] over 30,000 people with disabilities, including people with intellectual disabilities and people with mental health issues, are still warehoused in Romanian institutions. When one person dies in an institution, another fills their bed, often for the rest of their lives too. Placement in these institutions still means lifelong segregation for them, with very little hope of ever being able to regain their freedom, or even to challenge their detention. The spotlight has increasingly been turned to the appalling conditions in these institutions due to a number of recent and highly-publicised scandals including:
It’s a scandal that thousands of people are warehoused in institutions, representing a gross and systematic violation of international human rights law. It’s a scandal that their segregation and abuse is being funded by the European Commission. Over 8 million Euro of European taxpayers’ money has been funding the Romanian government’s policy of locking up people with intellectual disabilities and mental health issues alone. Once inside, the key is effectively thrown away: no-one leaves unless they die there.
The Institute for Public Policy in Bucharest has estimated that over 24 million Euro in European Structural Funds has been spent on all institutions for people with a range of physical and mental disabilities in the country, affecting up to 18,000 adults.
MDAC has started a petition to the EU because the European Commission's funding breaches international law
Segregating people with disabilities from society, stripping them of the right to make decisions, denying them the right to vote: this is nothing short of apartheid. Under international law, governments MUST take real steps to move people with disabilities out of institutions, and into the community with access to support services. The “right to live in the community” is guaranteed by Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The EU ratified the Convention in 2010. This means it MUST comply with its provisions - including in the way it channels funding to European governments. Romania ratified the CRPD just over a month later, in early 2011.
So much for official UN documents. On the ground in Romania, there is endemic segregation, violence and abuse in institutions:
- Preventable deaths from pneumonia of a number of young people with disabilities segregated in an institution in Bucharest. Romanian television broadcast the disgusting conditions in May 2013 showing residents tied to their beds, being shouted at and beaten, being force-fed and being kept in the dark day and night.
- The death of 18-year old Valentin Câmpeanu who was killed by the Romanian government. He had HIV and learning disabilities. In 2004 he died in an unheated cleaning cupboard of a government-run hospital, malnourished and with nurses refusing to care for him, ignorantly thinking that they could catch HIV from touch. The Centre for Legal Resources in Bucharest, in conjunction with Interights, have taken Mr Câmpeanu's case to the European Court of Human Rights, because the Romanian justice system has failed to hold anyone accountable for his death. Read our Executive Director’s account of the case here, including MDAC's role in submitting a third party intervention.
It’s a scandal that thousands of people are warehoused in institutions, representing a gross and systematic violation of international human rights law. It’s a scandal that their segregation and abuse is being funded by the European Commission. Over 8 million Euro of European taxpayers’ money has been funding the Romanian government’s policy of locking up people with intellectual disabilities and mental health issues alone. Once inside, the key is effectively thrown away: no-one leaves unless they die there.
The Institute for Public Policy in Bucharest has estimated that over 24 million Euro in European Structural Funds has been spent on all institutions for people with a range of physical and mental disabilities in the country, affecting up to 18,000 adults.
MDAC has started a petition to the EU because the European Commission's funding breaches international law
Segregating people with disabilities from society, stripping them of the right to make decisions, denying them the right to vote: this is nothing short of apartheid. Under international law, governments MUST take real steps to move people with disabilities out of institutions, and into the community with access to support services. The “right to live in the community” is guaranteed by Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The EU ratified the Convention in 2010. This means it MUST comply with its provisions - including in the way it channels funding to European governments. Romania ratified the CRPD just over a month later, in early 2011.
So much for official UN documents. On the ground in Romania, there is endemic segregation, violence and abuse in institutions:
- Tantava Institution – received €500,000 from EU Structural Funds. TV and newspapers broke the story in 2007 of staff-on-patient sexual abuse, beatings and allegations that staff were making the residents to carry out forced labour for their own benefit.
- Techirghiol Institution – received over €450,000 from EU Structural Funds. In 2000, the institution’s director and some staff were sentenced to imprisonment for fraud, having used money allocated for ‘renovation’ for their own benefit. Conditions in the institution were uninhabitable. Bedrooms without heating, residents forced to use dangerously broken furniture, and forced to breath in damp risking their health.
- Bilteni Institution – received almost €135,000 from EU Structural Funds. Even the Romanian government’s own Agency for Social Inspection found residents were forced to endure e a daily lack of dignity. Despite the lovely European funds, there were not even any doors or cubicles on the toilets!
Inhuman and degrading conditions in Romanian psychiatric hospital
May 14, 2014 - Human rights judges have accepted a complaint against inhuman and degrading conditions suffered by a patient in a Romanian psychiatric hospital.
In the case of Parascineti v. Romania (application no. 32060/05), the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The complaint was brought by Mihai Parascineti, who objected to his treatment in an overcrowded psychiatric ward with very poor standards of hygiene. Under Article 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention, the Court held that Romania was to pay him 6,000 euros (EUR) in respect of non-pecuniary damage and EUR 300 in respect of costs and expenses.
On 29 June 2005, Parascineti, who suffered from serious functional deficiency, with headaches, articular pains, eye problems and congenital dislocation of the hip, for which he had a prosthesis, was admitted to the endocrinology department of the Baia Mare county hospital.
On 5 July 2005 he displayed signs of acute psychosis and was urgently admitted to the psychiatric ward of the Sighetu Marmatiei municipal hospital. While Parascinetialleged that this had occurred when he refused to have an injection, the Romanian Government submitted that he had been committed to the psychiatric ward afterreturning to the hospital under the influence of alcohol and in a state of aggressiveness and agitation.
Parascineti complained that conditions in the psychiatric ward during his stay there from 5 to 13 July 2005 were appalling, that dozens of patients – some of whom had scabies and lice – were housed in the same room and that he had even had to share his bed with one or two other patients. The smell from the toilets, which were at one end of the room, was unbearable and, like the other patients, he was not allowed out into the fresh air. Furthermore, all 70 to 100 patients in the ward were given access to the bathroom at the same time and had to share the only two showers there.
Decision of the Court
Article 3
The Romanian Government argued that the complaint was inadmissible because the applicant had not exhausted the domestic remedies. The Court noted that where conditions of detention in Romanian prisons were concerned it had already held, on the one hand, that the Government had not demonstrated the existence of an effective remedy to redress a complaint under Article 3 of the Convention and, on the other hand, that a compensatory remedy alone could not prevent the continuation of the alleged violation. The complaint was therefore admissible.
The Court reiterated that the State was required to ensure that all persons deprived of their liberty were detained in conditions which were compatible with respect for their human dignity, that the manner and method of the execution of the measure did not subject them to distress or hardship of an intensity exceeding the unavoidable level of suffering inherent in detention and that, given the practical demands of imprisonment, their health and well-being were adequately secured. In cases of mental illness, increased vigilance was required in view of the detainees’ vulnerability and the risk that this would heighten their sense of inferiority and powerlessness.
In this case the Court noted that Parascineti had given a detailed and coherent description of what he had endured, and in particular the overcrowding and the very poor conditions of hygiene in the psychiatric hospital. The Government were unable to give any information concerning the applicant’s actual circumstances during his stay at the municipal hospital, but they admitted that at the time the conditions in the psychiatric wards at Sighetu Marmatiei hospital had been inadequate. There were rooms with 20 to 30 beds and sometimes two patients had to share a bed. The conditions of hygiene were unsatisfactory, there were not enough specialised staff and the patients were likely to catch scabies or become infested with lice.
The Court considered that such conditions, which were already inadequate for any individual deprived of his liberty, were even more so for someone like the applicant, who had been diagnosed with mental disorders and consequently needed specialised treatment as well as a minimum standard of hygiene. The Court accordingly found that there had been a violation of Article 3.
Article 5
As the applicant had not exhausted the remedies available under Romanian law, where there was a special procedure for challenging commitment for psychiatric treatment, the Court rejected this complaint as inadmissible. [5]
In the case of Parascineti v. Romania (application no. 32060/05), the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The complaint was brought by Mihai Parascineti, who objected to his treatment in an overcrowded psychiatric ward with very poor standards of hygiene. Under Article 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention, the Court held that Romania was to pay him 6,000 euros (EUR) in respect of non-pecuniary damage and EUR 300 in respect of costs and expenses.
On 29 June 2005, Parascineti, who suffered from serious functional deficiency, with headaches, articular pains, eye problems and congenital dislocation of the hip, for which he had a prosthesis, was admitted to the endocrinology department of the Baia Mare county hospital.
On 5 July 2005 he displayed signs of acute psychosis and was urgently admitted to the psychiatric ward of the Sighetu Marmatiei municipal hospital. While Parascinetialleged that this had occurred when he refused to have an injection, the Romanian Government submitted that he had been committed to the psychiatric ward afterreturning to the hospital under the influence of alcohol and in a state of aggressiveness and agitation.
Parascineti complained that conditions in the psychiatric ward during his stay there from 5 to 13 July 2005 were appalling, that dozens of patients – some of whom had scabies and lice – were housed in the same room and that he had even had to share his bed with one or two other patients. The smell from the toilets, which were at one end of the room, was unbearable and, like the other patients, he was not allowed out into the fresh air. Furthermore, all 70 to 100 patients in the ward were given access to the bathroom at the same time and had to share the only two showers there.
Decision of the Court
Article 3
The Romanian Government argued that the complaint was inadmissible because the applicant had not exhausted the domestic remedies. The Court noted that where conditions of detention in Romanian prisons were concerned it had already held, on the one hand, that the Government had not demonstrated the existence of an effective remedy to redress a complaint under Article 3 of the Convention and, on the other hand, that a compensatory remedy alone could not prevent the continuation of the alleged violation. The complaint was therefore admissible.
The Court reiterated that the State was required to ensure that all persons deprived of their liberty were detained in conditions which were compatible with respect for their human dignity, that the manner and method of the execution of the measure did not subject them to distress or hardship of an intensity exceeding the unavoidable level of suffering inherent in detention and that, given the practical demands of imprisonment, their health and well-being were adequately secured. In cases of mental illness, increased vigilance was required in view of the detainees’ vulnerability and the risk that this would heighten their sense of inferiority and powerlessness.
In this case the Court noted that Parascineti had given a detailed and coherent description of what he had endured, and in particular the overcrowding and the very poor conditions of hygiene in the psychiatric hospital. The Government were unable to give any information concerning the applicant’s actual circumstances during his stay at the municipal hospital, but they admitted that at the time the conditions in the psychiatric wards at Sighetu Marmatiei hospital had been inadequate. There were rooms with 20 to 30 beds and sometimes two patients had to share a bed. The conditions of hygiene were unsatisfactory, there were not enough specialised staff and the patients were likely to catch scabies or become infested with lice.
The Court considered that such conditions, which were already inadequate for any individual deprived of his liberty, were even more so for someone like the applicant, who had been diagnosed with mental disorders and consequently needed specialised treatment as well as a minimum standard of hygiene. The Court accordingly found that there had been a violation of Article 3.
Article 5
As the applicant had not exhausted the remedies available under Romanian law, where there was a special procedure for challenging commitment for psychiatric treatment, the Court rejected this complaint as inadmissible. [5]
HIV/AIDS
HIV/AIDS wrought devastation in Romania in the 1980s and 1990s. The victims were mostly small children infected in hospitals. Poor sterilization facilities and dubious medical practices, such as infected blood transfusions, were largely to blame. Those that did not die were often ostracized, and many were abandoned. Antiretroviral treatment is free and available to those who need it. Death rates have plummeted. In fact, Romania is now often cited as an example to other poor countries with major HIV/AIDS problems.
Yet a substantial number of Romanians with HIV still don’t know it. The generation infected in the 1980s and 1990s is now at reproductive age, and new cases are still appearing across the country, often years after infection. Health workers say sexual transmission is now the most common method.
According to official statistics, 11, 581 patients diagnosed with HIV and AIDS were registered as of December 2014, with 741 new cases reported between January and December. Societal discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS occurred, and many persons with the disease dropped out of school due to stigmatization, discrimination, or disease. In December, on International HIV Day, the National Union of Organizations of Persons with HIV/AIDS launched a campaign to increase awareness of HIV infection. [6]
Yet a substantial number of Romanians with HIV still don’t know it. The generation infected in the 1980s and 1990s is now at reproductive age, and new cases are still appearing across the country, often years after infection. Health workers say sexual transmission is now the most common method.
According to official statistics, 11, 581 patients diagnosed with HIV and AIDS were registered as of December 2014, with 741 new cases reported between January and December. Societal discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS occurred, and many persons with the disease dropped out of school due to stigmatization, discrimination, or disease. In December, on International HIV Day, the National Union of Organizations of Persons with HIV/AIDS launched a campaign to increase awareness of HIV infection. [6]
List of References
1) http://newint.org/features/2013/11/01/abuse-romania/
2) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/8128644/My-glimpse-of-hell-and-the-pitiful-children-who-have-been-betrayed.html
3) http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2014/04/europe-hidden-shame-2014414124139195247.html
4) http://mdac.info/en/content/european-commission-funding-disability-segregation-and-abuse-breaches-international-law
5) http://www.humanrightseurope.org/2012/03/inhuman-and-degrading-conditions-in-romanian-psychiatric-hospital/
6) http://davidchronic.com/2014/06/09/the-situation-in-romania-2014/#_ftn35
1) http://newint.org/features/2013/11/01/abuse-romania/
2) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/8128644/My-glimpse-of-hell-and-the-pitiful-children-who-have-been-betrayed.html
3) http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2014/04/europe-hidden-shame-2014414124139195247.html
4) http://mdac.info/en/content/european-commission-funding-disability-segregation-and-abuse-breaches-international-law
5) http://www.humanrightseurope.org/2012/03/inhuman-and-degrading-conditions-in-romanian-psychiatric-hospital/
6) http://davidchronic.com/2014/06/09/the-situation-in-romania-2014/#_ftn35