Mental disability law in central and eastern Europe: paper, practice, promise

This paper explores socio-legal issues within mental disability systems in central and eastern Europe, focusing on the ten countries which have entered into an accession partnership with the European Union (EU) and will become members within the next few years, namely (starting from the north): Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria, countries with a combined population of almost 100 million people. These EU accession countries share a recent history of either being parts of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), part of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (Slovenia) or ruled from communist Moscow (the others)