Bulgaria

22 March 2012. Earlier this week, the Mental Disability Advocacy Center held a two-day training event on legal capacity and supported decision-making in Sofia, Bulgaria, for the members of the newly established task force on Bulgarian legal capacity law reform.

17 January 2012, Budapest and Sofia. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) today delivered a landmark victory for the rights of persons with psycho-social disabilities and intellectual disabilities in the case of Stanev v. Bulgaria. The Mental Disability Advocacy Center and the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee represented Mr. Stanev in his attempts to bring domestic proceedings and at the ECtHR.

On 9 February 2011, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held a hearing in the case of Stanev v. Bulgaria.  MDAC and the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee brought the case on behalf of Rusi Stanev, who was placed under guardianship and confined in a social care home.  Interights, a London-based NGO, intervened as a third party.  The Grand Chamber judgment could have wide-ranging implications for social care systems and legal capacity laws not only in Bulgaria, but throughout Europe.

Budapest, 10 December 2010. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will hold a hearing in the case of Stanev v. Bulgaria (application no. 36760/06) on 9 February 2011.  Information from the Court regarding the hearing and the case is available here

11 November 2009. It is twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall, and the collapse of socialist systems in Europe. The first case heard by the European Court of Human Rights since this anniversary deals with a situation which has changed little in the past twenty years: the segregation of hundreds of thousands of people labelled with intellectual disabilities, mental health problems and other types of disabilities.

Geneva, Sofia & Budapest, 3 December 2008. The World Organisation Against Torture, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the Mental Disability Advocacy Center call on the Bulgarian Parliament to legislate to stop human rights violations of persons with mental disabilities.