Special Committee on Human Rights (SCHR)
The remit of the SCHR is to ensure that human rights are never ignored in psychiatric practice.
We are the only committee in the world which is part of a professional medical organisation, and is focused solely on human rights.
- Forced migration
- Capacity and threshold for involuntary treatment, including coercion
- Sustainability, mental health and human rights
- Human rights implications of technology like artificial intelligence (AI)
- Delays in prison transfers
- Human rights in education and training
- Human rights and violent conflict
Human rights might be considered as the minimum level of protection afforded in law by a government to its citizens. These are the basic rights and freedoms that belong to every person in the world from birth to death, a manifestation of human dignity. They can never be taken away but are sometimes restricted.
Human rights as a concept date back to the Magna Carta in 1215. The Magna Carta stated that not even the king is above the law. However, it was the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Right in 1948 after the Second World War that first attempted to set out the fundamental rights of all humans, on a worldwide level, also to ensure that the human rights abuses during the Second World War are never repeated. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was adopted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1950, ratified by the UK in 1951.
The following rights in the ECHR are particularly relevant to mental health patients: right to life (Article 2), freedom from torture (Article 3), right to a fair trial (Article 6), right to a private and family life (Article 8), right to freedom of expression (Article 10), and protection from discrimination (Article 14).
In the UK, the principles of the ECHR were enshrined in law through the passing of the Human Rights Act (HRA) in 1998. This sets out the rights and freedoms to which everyone in the UK is entitled. There are 16 rights in the Act, set out as 'articles'. It also helps to ensure that any violation of rights can be challenged in a court of law.
Every psychiatrist should thus be fully aware of relevant human rights principles to be alert to the possibility of human rights violations in psychiatric practice. Mental health patients will additionally encounter police, NHS staff and social services. All these services are legally obliged to ensure that the human rights of patients are maintained and there is no breach of any right set out in the Act.