Rights of the child
Child protection
In 2009, the new government headed by Boyko Borisov initiated a dialogue with several non-governmental organisations working in the field of child protection. The non-governmental organisations presented to the new government their requests for changes in the legislation and the policies on supporting the families, delivery of social services, inclusive education, youth justice and deinstitutionalization.[1] On 11 December 2009 the government and 23 child protection NGOs, held a meeting to develop a vision on the deinstitutionalisation of children in Bulgaria. Based on the vision, a plan will be developed in 2010 containing specific steps for genuine deinstitutionalisation of children, starting with the institutions for children with disabilities and the institutions for children aged 0 to 3. Meanwhile, the Council of Ministers adopted on 8 December 2009 a decision on the financial standards for the social and the educational institutions. This is a continuation of the previous government’s policy with regard to the establishment of the institutional model of child care, insufficient financing for services in the community and insufficient support to the families in need.
Prevention of child abandonment
In 2009, the government did not increase the child allowances and the family assistance so that parent wouldn’t be forced to abandon their children for social and financial reasons. To the contrary, thousands of families were affected by the termination of the social benefits for at least one year, due to the 2006 changes to the Social Assistance Act. Under the Child Protection Act, the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy spent 6,000,000 BGN (3,076,923 EUR) in 2009 in the form of assistance and compensation under Programme 6 – Child Protection through the Transition from Institutional Care to Alternative Care in a Family Environment. The amount planned for 2010 is 7,400,000 BGN (3,794,871 EUR). Under Programme 9 – Support to Families with Children, the total amount of the monthly child benefits until the completion of secondary education under the Family Allowances for Children Act was 411,461,000 BGN (211,005,641 EUR) and in 2010 it will be 282,254,567 BGN (144,745,931 EUR) or some 130,000,000 BGN (66.66 mil EUR) less. The monthly allowances for a child until under the age of 1 were in the amount of 32,884,000 BGN (16,863,590 EUR) in 2009 and in 2010 they will be 20,385,000 BGN (10,453,846 EUR) or some BGN 12,500,000 (6.41 mil EUR) less. Under Programme 10 – Integration of People with Disabilities, the monthly allowances for children under the Integration of People with Disabilities Act totalled 40,320,000 BGN (20,676,923 EUR) in 2009 and in 2010 they will be 27,397,440 (14.05 mil EUR) or some BGN 13,000,000 (6.66 mil EUR) less. The funding of the last two programmes has been reduced by one third. This means that children under 1 and children with disabilities will suffer the most from the 2010 budget restrictions.
In terms of community-based social services, in 2009 the state financial support standards per child were the highest for the family type accommodation centers (4,000 EUR), the crises centres for children victims of violence (3,975 EUR) and the Mother and Baby units (3,518 EUR). The capacity of most services increased much slower than the growing needs of the children and the families, while the 2010 financial standards for all these services were reduced by some 256 EUR each. It’s obvious that the families and the children cannot compensate their deficiencies with these funds and with underdeveloped (with insufficient capacity and without being based on need regional needs) and low quality services in the community, and the children cannot be effectively protected from poverty, social exclusion and violence.
Access to education for children with disabilities at institutions for children with disabilities
With regard to the 2008 decision of the European Committee on Social Rights against Bulgaria, concerning the failure to provide education to the children placed in institutions for children with mental disabilities,[2] the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the MDAC once again organized (a year later) a roundtable with the participation of all key ministries and non-governmental organisations. The purpose was to remind the new government about this commitment. Once again it turned out that there is no clear plan on how to deliver on the obligation to provide education to children with mental disabilities. Data from the State Agency for Child Protection (SACP), provided on request by BHC in February 2009, indicate that the children with mental disabilities placed in 23 homes are being educated and trained. In April 2009, BHC asked randomly selected institutions what was the number of children who were receiving education and what type of education/training they were receiving. It turned out that the share of the children who were receiving education in the institutions for children with mental disabilities varies between 17% and 32%. The children studying at mainstream schools were only 9.9%. At a conference held by BHC on 3 November 2009, the new chair of the SACP and the new minister of education explained that there are great differences in the data available at the two institutions on the number of children at institutions who are getting education.
Inclusive education
Ordinance 1 on the Training of Children and Students with Special Educational Needs was adopted in January 2009. The ordinance was developed in 2007 and 2008 by a workgroup of the Ministry of Education with the participation of non-governmental organisations. The ordinance acknowledges the need to ensure psychological and teaching assistance to the children with special needs, defines the training at special schools as acceptable only “when all opportunities for integrated training have been explored,” allows plenty of opportunities to include different specialties in the training and introduces data collection and statistics. However, the ordinance does not provide a definition of the term “opportunities for integrated training,” does not include special programmes and teaching aids for the training of children with mental or multiple disabilities, and does not regulate in detail a mechanism for the collection and processing of data on the children with special needs that would guarantee adequate planning and provision of resources for their training.
The expert committees of the regional inspectorates on education once again are not obligated to evaluate periodically the educational needs of the children, which makes it difficult for the education to meet their real individual needs. The parents’ choice to have their child attend a mainstream school may be reduced to an unreasonable minimum, due to the fact that few schools have sufficient resources; they are not publicly known and there is no guarantee that their resources will be sufficient to accommodate an unlimited number of children. The ordinance does not create any new provisions on the vocational training of children with mental disabilities that would make children’s capabilities consistent with labour market needs. Again, this dooms even the children who have completed vocational education to unemployment and social isolation. The children from homes for children with mental disabilities are discriminated in the ordinance, which stipulates that they should only study at special schools. The ordinance doesn’t have a section defining the supporting environment parameters with regard to the children with mental disabilities. It doesn’t provide a real opportunity for vocational training or a description of the resource support activities aimed at children and students with mental disabilities, which cannot be carried out by the special schools.
Bulgaria still doesn’t have a database on all children with special educational needs. As long as there is no such database and the data in it couldn’t be compared to the data in the SACP and the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, there could be no reliable picture of the provision of education to children with disabilities according to their individual needs. Nor can the quality of such education be evaluated. In December 2009, the Council of Ministers decided to allocate for the first time 194 BGN (99 EUR) per child with a disability involved in integrated training at a mainstream school with resource support.
Social services for children in institutions – deinstitutionalization
The notorious institution for children with disabilities in the village of Mogilino was finally closed in 2009. Out of the planned six small houses for the children from Mogilino, one (for six children) began to function in October 2008 in Ruse, with insufficient funding, while another one was opened in Ruse in September 2009, at the Home for Medical and Social Care for Children Aged 0 to 3. The third house was built in Varna and was ready for use by September 2009. The closure of the institution for children with disabilities in the village of Gorna Koznitsa, carried out mainly by the Cedar Foundation and the municipalities of Bobov Dol and Kyustendil, was announced in September 2009. The closure was once again accompanied by many problems at the state level. Unfortunately, the public discussion of the problems faced by the children with disabilities placed in institutions did not result in the formulation of a clear, coordinated, long-term governmental policy. The media showed many cases of death, physical and sexual violence against children at the institutions. Nevertheless, the Bulgarian prosecution – asked by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee to inspect all institutions for children with disabilities, failed to find any evidence of crimes against children. In this connection, in September, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee filed a discrimination lawsuit against the prosecution.
Reform of the social homes for children
The lack of clarity on reforming and restructuring the homes for children continued in 2009. The annual state subsistence for children in institutions for children deprived of parental care and aged 7 through 18 – which was increased by 50% in 2008 – was additionally increased by some 750 BGN (385 EUR) per child in 2009; in the institutions for children with disabilities it was increased by some 800 BGN (410 EUR) per child. This trend has not been preserved in 2010 and the financial standards have been reduced to those in 2008. [3] Surprisingly, however, the standards for the special educational boarding institutions (for children with mental disabilities), SBS and CBS were increased in 2009; for the latter, the standard was 8,837 BGN (4,532 EUR) in 2009 and 9,220 BGN (4,728 EUR) in 2010. The state support to the institutions for children is evident, regardless of the common understanding that they have a negative effect on children’s physical, mental and emotional development. There is still no common political will to close the children’s institutions and to develop services and forms of support to the families.
The government has still not established a mechanism for reliable reporting of the number of children (with their individual characteristics) who use institutional services in homes or in boarding-house schools, but continues to finance under a single state financial standard all children’s institutions in the country, while for the institutions for medical and social care (subordinated to the Ministry of Health) such a standard still does not exist. Also, the government does not track how many children are placed and how many leave the childcare institutions every year, in order to measure the real deinstitutionalization. Collecting and comparing information from the various departments responsible for the children in institutions is extremely difficult due to the non-transparent and varying approaches that they use to report their activities, therefore leading to contradictory conclusions.
[1] The NGO Alliance vision on child care reform is available at: http://www.bghelsinki.org/index.php?module=news&lg=bg&id=1016. The proposals on the implementation of the NGO Alliance vision on child care reform are available at: http://www.bghelsinki.org/index.php?module=news&lg=bg&id=1397.
[2] For more details, see Human Rights in Bulgaria in 2008, Annual Report of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, March 2009.
[3] Council of Ministers decision No. 937 of 8.12. 2009 on the distribution of the activities financed by the municipal budgets in local activities and activities delegated by the state to identify funding standards for the activities delegated by the state in 2010, Appendix 5 to Item 4, available at: http://www.mon.bg/opencms/export/sites/mon/left_menu/budget/reshenieMS937_8-12-2009_pril5.pdf.
