EU fails to safeguard human rights
Mary Raftery’s excellent RTÉ documentary series “behind the walls” details past and ongoing problems within Ireland’s mental health sector; the second story relates to the alleged imprisonment of captive slave labourers in Britain.
While we are rightly concerned and appalled at what has happened in both instances, we seem less concerned as a European community with what is still happening within our borders. In 2004 an Amnesty International report into mental institutions in Romania detailed the use of captive slave labour to prop up an under-funded care system. Individuals who did not need to be in institutions were being retained in the system to carry out unpaid maintenance and facilities work, replacing an inadequate budget with slave labour. No significant reform of the Romanian mental health system has taken place in the interim; suffering as depicted in the RTÉ documentary still goes on today, within the borders of the EU.