18 Feb State’s Responsibility for the inhuman and degrading treatment of a disabled child

In the case of L.R. v. North Macedonia (application no. 38067/15, 23.01.2020) 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 case concerned a child, L.R., who has been in the care of State-run institutions since he was three months old and allegations of inadequate care and ill-treatment. L.R. was abandoned by his mentally ill parents after he was born in 2004. A social welfare centre was appointed as his guardian, which since then has ordered and arranged his placement in several State-run social care institutions. Growth delay was detected when he was one year old and, at the age of three and half, a team of hospital doctors diagnosed him with mental, physical (cerebral palsy) and speech disabilities. His case came to the notice of an NGO when the Ombudsman visited him in an institute in 2013 and found him tied to his bed. 

The application was lodged by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Skopje (“the HCHR”) on behalf of L.R., a Macedonian/citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia.

First, the Court considered that in the exceptional circumstances of the case and bearing in mind the serious nature of the allegations, the HCHR should be granted standing to act as the applicant’s representative.

The Court found it particularly worrying that someone as vulnerable as the applicant, an eightyear-old mentally disabled child who was deaf and could not speak, had frequently been tied to his bed during his stay of approximately a year and nine months in an institute which had clearly been inappropriate as it was for the physically disabled, despite the staff there voicing their concerns to the authorities from the outset that it was understaffed and not qualified to cope with him. 

The Court considered that the authorities had been under an obligation to safeguard the applicant’s dignity and well-being as he had at all times been in their care, and they had therefore been responsible for his inappropriate placement in the institute, lack of requisite care and the inhuman and degrading treatment that he had endured. It concluded that there had been a violation of the applicant’s rights under Article 3.

Besides that, the lack of requisite care and the inhuman and degrading treatment he had endured, led to a violation of Article 3 (investigation) because of the authorities’ failure to hold a proper inquiry into the case. Moreover, the investigation, instead of looking into the general failure of the system in L.R.’s case, had focused on the institute’s employees’ individual criminal liability, which had led to the prosecutors finding that there had been no intention to harm the child and dismissing his case.

References from the official website of the European Court of Human Rights