Statement on the publication of the expert opinion by lawyers Kaleck & Co. on Monday 25/2/2008 concerning the irreconcilableness of the Berlin mental heath law with the UN Disability Convention by René Talbot Board member of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Psychiatrie-Erfahrener e.V.

from left to right: Dr. D. Behrendt, Prof. Dr. W.-D. Narr, R. Talbot

Ten
years ago the Foucault
Tribunal and 7 years ago the Russell
Tribunal took place in Berlin. Both tribunals included
in its verdict:
We demand the abolition of the „mental patients“
laws as a first step toward making psychiatry accountable
to society.
Now a fulfillment of this demand might be reached by the fact
that on 30/3/2007 the German government signed the UN Disability
Convention passed by the UN General Assembly on 13.12.2006.
With the intended ratification of this convention by both
houses of the German lawmaking system, our assumption is that
implicitly coercive psychiatry can entirely be brought to
fall and because of this hope, we commissioned a legal expert
opinion on this, using the Berlin PsychKG (the mental health
law in Berlin) as an example. For this purpose we contracted
the law firm of the renowned specialist lawyer in human rights
questions and the chairman of the “Republican Lawyers‘
Association”, Wolfgang
Kaleck.

This
expert opinion published today in the regional state Berlin
Parliament already has considerable support from commentators
such as tenured professor Wolf-Dieter Narr and tenured professor
Eckard Rohrmann. We were particularly pleased by the comments
of Law Professor Theresia Degener, who supports the expert
opinion in its conclusion. Mrs. Professor Degener is a special
expert for the UN Disability Convention because as part of
the German delegation, she participated considerably in it’s
development.

The
Federal Government and its supporting parties, by signing
it, have documented that they too want the ratification of
the convention.
Because the abolishment of coercive psychiatry – to our regret
– was unfortunately not explicitly stipulated in the convention,
the implicit logic of the convention is now pointed out by
the expert opinion, which leads to the same result: the legislator
should only ratify the convention if, in doing so, at the
same time it eliminates the three legal columns of coercive
psychiatry. Although the expert opinion quite specifically
only examines the reconcilableness of the convention with
the Berlin PsychKG, it is transferable to all other PsychKG’s
of all other federal states. The second column of coercive
psychiatry, the incapacitation against the will of the individual,
euphemistically called „guardianship“ („Betreuung“),
is explicitly contradicted by Article 12. In addition, regarding
the UN Disability Convention, the law will have to be changed
by the abolishment of § 63 of the penal code [forensic
psychiatry after a insanity defence], as proved by the dissertation
by Annelie Prapolinat. This dissertation is unreservedly
supported by the expert
opinion by tenured professor Wolf-Dieter Narr commissioned
by the “Committee
for Constitutional Rights and Democracy” [a highly
respected human rights organisation], quote: If one reads
Annelie Prapolinat’s work and again studies § 63 of the
penal code, then it rapidly falls apart like mouldy mushrooms
and leaves nothing.

Although
I am extraordinarily satisfied with the result of the expert
opinion by lawyers Kaleck,
Hilbrans
and Scharmer,
I would like to refer to the points in which it substantially
deviates from the opinion of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft
Psychiatrie-Erfahrener (die-BPE,
an organisation of German survivors of psychiatry:

I
am very pleased by the fact that Member of Parliament Mr.
Behrendt and the Berlin Green parliamentary group is publicly
presenting this expert opinion together with us and in doing
so shows their readiness to discuss the implicit consequences
of the UN Disability Convention. In this regard, one thing
is certain: with the publication of this expert opinion we
link the demand on the legislators in the federal states and
on a federal level to get rid of coercive psychiatry immediately,
so that the UN Disability Convention can then be ratified.

We
would be very pleased if the Berlin parliament would abolish
at short notice and without substitution all coercive passages
of the Berlin PsychKG.