Russia will not create a service to protect the rights of wards of PNI

The State Duma Committee on Health Protection unanimously voted to abolish the article of the law, according to which the Service for the Protection of the Rights of Psychoneurological Interns (PNI) should be created in Russia.

According to the deputies, they decided to exclude the article, since the service has not been created in Russia in 30 years. Human rights activist Nyuta Federmesser, who participated in the committee meeting, urged not to vote for the amendments and to wait at least until autumn.

The deputies declared that the article on public control over PNI will remain in the law. According to Federmesser, control and protection of rights are different things. “Public officials do not have a proxy,” she wrote in her blog after the meeting. The human rights activist also noted that they are allowed to go to the PNI, “only then and there, where the director allows.”

Federmesser believes that the amendments “give the country’s psychiatric boarding schools and their directors the right to hegemony, violence and dehumanization” and “legitimize the powerlessness of those who already have nothing left – residents of boarding schools and orphanages.”

Since 1992, when the law “On Psychiatric Assistance” was adopted, only one service for the protection of the rights of PNI wards has been created – in the Nizhny Novgorod region, precisely on the initiative of Federmesser. In her opinion, instead of abolishing the article, it is necessary to oblige other regions to create similar services.

However, the deputies say that the administration of the President of Russia opposes this, and they themselves “do not decide anything here,” writes Federmesser. She reported that after the meeting, human rights activists sent a letter to the president, which was signed by forty thousand people, asking him to veto the amendments.