EDF and MHE call on the Committee of Bioethics of the Council of Europe to show real commitment to voluntary care



EDF and MHE call on the Committee of Bioethics of the Council of Europe to show real commitment to voluntary care

Together with Mental Health Europe and other partners, we have been calling on the Council of Europe, and in particular its Committee of Bioethics, to stop working on legislation that would allow any forms of involuntary treatment and placement in psychiatry. More information about our campaign against the draft additional protocol to the Oviedo Convention is available here.

In 2019, the Committee of Bioethics took the initiative to work on a compendium on good practices in mental health care. This was seen as an important and positive initiative. Our organisations were invited and actively participated to a roundtable consultation on this work in Brussels in November 2019. We also sent several written inputs on the concept note on this work and disseminated the call for good practice.

However, our organisations can no longer support this work as long as the Council of Europe continues to put the draft additional protocol to the Oviedo Convention for adoption. We are in particular concerned to see the compendium presented together with the draft protocol at the Committee of Bioethics’s meeting in November 2021.

We call on the Council of Europe and its Committee of Bioethics to withdraw the draft additional protocol to the Oviedo Convention and ensure that the compendium on good practices and potential recommendations on ending coercion align with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Parliamentary Assembly’s Resolution and recommendation on ending coercion in mental health: the need for a human rights-based approach and the Human Rights Comment on “Reform of mental health services: an urgent need and a human rights imperative” published by the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights in April 2021.

Read the letter sent to the Committee of Bioethics on 5th of July 2021.