Mexican government accused of torture by ex-patients of disabled care home

For decades, disabled children and adults living in institutions worldwide have suffered abuse of all kinds – from deprivation and solitary confinement in miniature cells, to sexual abuse and forced sterilisation.

Now a charity which has documented this abuse for more than 20 years is bringing a landmark legal case against the Mexican government, with the intention of laying down a new line in international law.

Throughout their years of research, Disability Rights International (DRI) has found sickening abuse in donor, state-funded and private institutions for people with disabilities across the world. A three-year investigation in Ukraine revealed that children detained in institutions without “adequate government oversight” were at risk of being trafficked for sex, pornography, or organs. At a psychiatric asylum in Argentina in the early 2000s, DRI (then known as Mental Disability Rights International) documented patients locked naked in tiny isolation cells. When people with psychosocial disabilities are subjected to social and sensory isolation like this, it is classed as degrading treatment or torture, according to the UN special rapporteur on torture.

They’re not protecting the women from getting raped by sterilising them, they’re protecting them from getting pregnant

Eric Rosenthal, executive director of DRI

The institutions that house children and adults in Mexico have been one of DRI’s principal focuses since 2000. Their first groundbreaking report documenting abuse in the Samuel Ramirez hospital in Mexico City contributed to the landmark 2006 UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

In 2014, a two-year investigation into the state of facilities for people with disabilities in Mexico City found residents were sexually abused, locked in cages, left permanently in cribs, and overall detained in “dehumanising conditions”, as the charity described it. “People with disabilities have the right to stay in society and not be locked up,” said Eric Rosenthal, executive director of DRI. In Mexico he witnessed “effectively no community services; a total system of segregation”.

The case that DRI is now bringing centres on children and adults detained at Casa Esperanza institution in Mexico City. Casa Esperanza featured on a list compiled by Mexico City authorities of facilities for people with disabilities that were particularly abusive that was passed to DRI in May 2014 by an anonymous source.

In repeated visits to Casa Esperanza in 2014 and 2015 carried out by representatives from DRI, who were open about their intentions to investigate the facility, 37 people were found to be held in “dangerous, violent, degrading and unhygienic conditions”.

In one interview with the director of the institution in 2014, which is recorded on video, he states that the forced sterilisation of some of the women in the home is standard policy as a precautionary measure against pregnancy, in reference to the risk of sexual abuse (a resident told DRI that a repairman had raped her). “They’re not protecting them from getting raped, they’re protecting them from getting pregnant,” said Rosenthal.

Interviews conducted by DRI with patients at Casa Esperanza who were able to communicate disclosed harrowing tales of assault. Five women revealed they were being sexually abused by a relative of a senior staff member, and a workman.

Disability Rights International has documented the abuse of people in institutions for more than 20 years Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

DRI met with the Mexico City System for Integral Family Development (DIF-DF) in June 2014 to make them aware of the abuses, including forced sterilisation and isolation, and later sent a formal letter with photographic evidence, but it was not until September 2015 that Casa Esperanza was closed.

In the timeline of events which DRI outlines in their legal petition, DIF-DF visited Casa Esperanza in January 2015 and witnessed the same abuses DRI had recorded. “The facility was known to be abusive and allowed to continue as such,” said Rosenthal.

Once Casa Esperanza was shut down by Mexico City authorities, many of the residents were moved to different facilities. The charity followed up with some of the young people after they left Casa Esperanza. “We know that at least two people have died [since moving from Casa Esperanza]; we know that one woman was systematically raped, and I read the testimonies from the rape she suffered in the new institution, and it was even worse,” said Priscila Rodríguez, DRI’s associate director.

The case which DRI is bringing against the Mexican government under international law seeks reparation for the residents who were detained in these conditions. It calls for Mexico to provide full community integration for not only the survivors of Casa Esperanza, but for all people with disabilities who are institutionalised. To do this, Mexico must provide housing and other support services for disabled people to live in the community. The Inter-American Court has granted financial reparations to victims of torture in some previous cases, so there may be a possibility of compensation.

An investigation into the state of facilities for people with disabilities in Mexico City found residents were sexually abused, locked in cages, and overall detained in “dehumanising conditions” Photograph: Sasa Stankovic/EPA

The charity claims the Mexican government had knowledge of the abuses taking place at the institution. They argue that the abuses constitute torture, contrary to Mexico’s obligations under international human rights law. Accordingly, in January this year DRI and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law filed a case at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and are calling for deinstitutionalisation across the country. They aim to get recognition under international law that disabled people have the right to live in the community. If the commission decides that they have a case, it will go before the Inter-American court. The government is legally bound to accept the court’s decision.

The Olmstead case was a historic breakthrough throughout the world and drove a lot of deinstitutionalisation in the US

Professor Gerard Quinn, disability law specialist

The Mexico City authorities say that after learning about the matter in 2014, they “undertook various inter-institutional actions to address the issues… initiating supervision and follow-up work… A series of joint operations were carried out between the Human Rights Commission of Mexico City, DRI, and the DIF of Mexico City, aimed at protecting the rights of the disabled population that were in [Casa Esperanza], with the aim of taking them out of that home and placing them in the care of other social organisations that provide alternative care, follow up and accompaniment to persons with disabilities.”

They state that the state authorities took the necessary steps in order to make sure that the institution was closed down, and to this day continue to work on behalf of of the persons that were removed from [Casa Esperanza], “in order to guarantee the enjoyment and exercise of their human rights, as well as to promote the development of their autonomy. These are fundamental for the strengthening of the agenda of Persons with Disabilities deprived of family care, in which the main objective is to promote their inclusion in the community”.

“Survivors of Casa Esperanza committed no crime, yet they are serving a life sentence in Mexico’s mental health institutions,” says Rosenthal. “The case presents a new legal claim that has never been before established under international law; that is the idea of a right to community integration.”

It is based on the case of Olmstead v LC in 1999, which is seen as one of the most important civil rights cases for people with disabilities in the US. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of two women with mental health conditions and intellectual disabilities in Georgia for support to be provided in the community, after they had spent their lives continuously moving in and out of state psychiatric hospitals. The lawsuit went to the supreme court, which held that people with disabilities have a right to receive state-funded support and services in the community, rather than institutions.

“The Olmstead decision had crystal clarity in terms of inappropriate institutionalisation amounting to discrimination. It was a huge historic breakthrough throughout the world; it has had really huge impact, [and] it has been driving a lot of deinstitutionalisation in the US,” said Prof Gerard Quinn who specialises in disability law at NUI Galway, “[The Mexico case] has the potential for having an impact in Latin America if it goes further.”

“Historically, disability rights have been ignored,” said Rodríguez. “Segregation is a practice that’s been systematically used for people with disabilities, and it’s important to change that mindset. We are saying that to segregate a person on the basis of their disability is one of the most aggressive forms of discrimination.”

“[This] will be the first case about community integration in Latin America, and we are very keen to have that precedent established not only in Mexico, but in the whole continent,” Rodríguez said. “We do hope that similar action can take place somewhere else. For instance, the European Human Rights System and the Inter-American Human Rights system rely on each other for standard-setting, a case before the European Court can be used as an international standard before the Inter-American Court and vice-versa. This case could thus also be used as a standard in other human rights system, such as the European and also at the International level, such as before UN Committees.”

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Mexican government accused of torture by ex-patients of disabled care home

The Mexican "germ invasion" is just the right"s latest anti-immigration myth | Laura Murphy

Late last week, prior to President Obama gave up on pressuring Congress on extensive immigration reform in favor of his acquainted executive actions, media retailers began pressing a familiar non-information item.

The regional CBS station in Dallas/Fort Really worth reported that “four or five [US Border Patrol] agents have examined positive” for illnesses such as chicken pox or tuberculosis, ostensibly contracted at their border posts. With in excess of 18,500 agents stationed along the Mexican border, the headline probably ought to have been some thing like “Border Patrol Agents Unusually Healthful Between Americans”. Matt Drudge favored, as normal, a far more pernicious threat: BORDER PATROL AGENTS Check Constructive FOR Disease CARRIED BY IMMIGRANTS.

Channel eleven in Dallas also reported that one of the young children among the 52,000 who have crossed US borders in the last handful of months has been diagnosed with H1N1 virus (also acknowledged as “swine flu”). Congressman Henry Cuellar blamed the possible issue on “some of these countries the place they don’t have fantastic health care methods.” Perhaps he was speaking about the United States: Now that H1N1 is the predominant flu strain in the US and Canada, the Centers for Illness Manage reviews that two,008 of the two,815 reported instances of the flu in the US this season have been recognized as H1N1. That indicates that if you had the flu in the US in the past 9 months, it is much more than 70% likely that you have been contaminated with the swine flu, just like the sick little one trapped in Texas.

A little informed comparison can be beneficial: a examine of mortality among US school teachers suggests that they contract autoimmune illnesses at a fee disproportionate with the common population. Also: the subway is a significant conduit for the spread of influenza, including swine flu.

Thankfully, we haven’t begun a Typhoid Mary-style campaign against each and every American who employed public transportation, taught a middle-college class and/or sneezed this 12 months. But the myth of diseased hordes of immigrants has a long background in the American imagination, and now it is inflaming anti-immigration sentiment at a time when we need to tackle the genuine humanitarian requirements of the men and women who cross our borders in search of chance.

Even though President Obama said on Monday that he is doing work to “handle the urgent humanitarian challenge on the border”, the conservative radio host Bryan Fischer suggests that the genuine “humanitarian disaster” is the risk the young children pose to US citizens’ health. (He also thinks “children are now dying at the border due to the fact of Obama”.) Dr Marc Siegel preemptively declared on Fox News that the immigrant children had been “a big overall health crisis” – despite the reality that the US Department of Wellness and Human Services vaccinates and screens every recovered kid.

The consequence of this false reporting is widespread public anxiousness that immigrant populations pose a risk to the well being and safety of US citizens. And the normal “not in my neighborhood” cries have gone up on social media, insisting that the girls and kids who have just lately migrated in huge waves need to not be allowed a protected area to dwell in the United States while their situations get sorted out.

The howls are specifically egregious if it means the latest migrants to America reside anyplace close to the apparently complete-blooded Americans who do not recall their very own immigrant heritages or their ancestors who had been wrongfully accused of contaminating the nation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Let’s place this summer’s rhetoric into viewpoint: 1918 noticed a worldwide flu pandemic in the course of which at least 20m men and women died globally and as many as 550,000 died in the US alone. At times known as Spanish influenza simply because the first circumstances have been diagnosed in Spain, tiny was identified about who carried the flu and in which it originated. But the infection knew no age, class, race or ethnic bounds – folks all above the globe succumbed to a simple but deadly flu.

Nonetheless, US reporting on the Spanish flu and other diseases that arose at that time suggested erroneously that a surge in immigration caused the enhanced infections. In Denver, the Ku Klux Klan promoted anti-Italian sentiment by suggesting that the recent immigrants from Europe were responsible for the flu. Germans have been accused of employing the flu as germ warfare. Irish immigrants have been charged with spreading cholera. Tuberculosis was dubbed the “tailor’s disease” since men and women connected it with Jewish immigrants. Italians had been blamed for polio, too, despite the fact that they had been least most likely to contract it.

The terror of immigration-born epidemics was largely imagined, of course, but it fueled extremely real anti-immigrant fears and resulted in discrimination and oppression. These when-racialized groups are now folded into “whiteness” such that their histories of immigration have largely been erased from nationwide memory. Without considerable immigration reform, I concern the stigma connected to immigrants on the Mexican border could not fade so fast.

The Mexican "germ invasion" is just the right"s latest anti-immigration myth | Laura Murphy

Investigative journalism awards for Nigerian editor and Mexican reporter

A Nigerian editor and a Mexican freelance journalist whose investigative reviews exposed companies that endangered public overall health have won the 2014 Knight Worldwide Journalism Award.

Oluwatoyosi Ogunseye, editor of Nigeria’s Sunday Punch newspaper, uncovered that a manufacturing plant’s fumes were generating local residents seriously unwell.

Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, a freelance reporter in Mexico, showed how businesses that flagrantly violated the law had been leading to deaths and injuries.

“These journalists went the additional mile to expose health dangers,” mentioned Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ). “Their coverage forced governments to get robust action to defend the public nicely-getting.”

Ogunseye is the youngest and 1st female editor in the 40-year history of Sunday Punch, a broadly study newspaper primarily based in Lagos.

She published a three-part series which unveiled that residents in a Lagos community had higher amounts of harmful toxins in their blood induced by pollutants from a nearby steel plant.

The coverage prompted the government to shut down the plant, and to enable it to reopen only underneath stringent new regulations.

In Mexico, an investigation by von Bertrab revealed that fumes from gas leaking into Guadalajara sewers posed an imminent danger. Shortly after her story ran, the gases exploded, killing at least 200 men and women, destroying 26 city blocks, and leaving as a lot of twenty,000 homeless.

Source: ICFJ here and here

Investigative journalism awards for Nigerian editor and Mexican reporter