JUSTICE FOR ALL
Great limitations concern the whole system
of measures aimed at those persons with
intellectual or psychosocial disabilities
who are recognised as people who cannot
be charged. In their case, the abolition of
forensic psychiatric hospitals should have
also caused a paradigm shift from one
centred on the prevalence of the public
interest in security (which entailed a 'neutralisation' of the person) to the prevalence
of the right to health care (balanced by the
collective right to security) of the person
declared unfit to stand trial because of
an intellectual or psychosocial disability.
For this reason, in the idea of the 2014
legislator, the introduction of the REMS
should have represented an extrema ratio
in a framework of management of cases
of social dangerousness that should have
been managed on the territory and by the
territory in particular by the mental health
services. However, the greatest limitation
lies precisely here. There are few residential
facilities (e.g., community facilities) able to
cope with these requests and little if any
territorial coordination between health
authorities, courts and community facilities.
There is also resistance in the culture of
all the institutional actors involved in this
issue, who end up resorting more easily to
the known routes, preferring detention or in
any case measures of deprivation of liberty.
impossible to 'unload' people who develop
an intellectual or psycho-social disability
onto REMS. Until then, the prison institution had in fact the possibility of having an
institution, OPGs, on which to ‘unload’ all
problematic and difficult cases. The prison
would have continued to send people to
the REMS and overcrowd them, as it did
with the OPGs before, using the label of
intellectual or psychosocial disability as an
'excuse' to delegate the management of
that individual to others. The only way to
break this mechanism, was to distinguish
the sanctioning response, precluding, by
law, the possibility of resorting to admission
to REMS.
The REMS also have certain limitations, two
of them being the fact that the waiting lists
are often filled by people awaiting in prison
(the ECtHR recently expressed its opinion
in the Sy vs. Italy case). Secondly, even
though the law that led to the abolition
of the OPGs also abolished the so-called
‘white life sentences’, imposing a maximum
limit on the duration of the measure of
confinement in the REMS, making it coincide with the duration of the maximum
sentence for the crime committed, in reality,
leaving the REMS is often not so simple and
straightforward.
Recommendation Rec(2006)2-rev of the
Committee of Ministers to member States
on the European Prison Rules stresses that
prisoners shall be allocated, as far as possible,
to prisons close to their homes or places of
social rehabilitation.522
Also, the creation of the REMS system
has created an important effect on the
management of people with intellectual or
psychosocial disability in prisons within the
ATSMs. Indeed, Law No 81 of 2014 made it
Despite the many limitations and criticalities
of the REMS system, it is undeniable that it
represents a great improvement from the
previous OPG system both in terms of conditions of detention (which were previously
called ‘unworthy of a civilised country’ by
the President of the Republic) as well as of
mental health service, which is now oriented
on the care needs of the person. From these
points of view, the REMS system can be
considered a success even though many
improvements still need to be done.
ANNEX 5: LITHUANIA - HALFWAY HOUSES IN LITHUANIA
The first Halfway House in Lithuania was
opened in 2016, in Alytus, after the Ministry of
Justice of the Republic of Lithuania started the
implementation of the project supported by
the Kingdom of Norway "Reducing the number
of convicts held in closed-type penitentiary
institutions by establishing 4 new open-type
penitentiary institutions". Subsequently,
Halfway Houses were opened in Marijampolė,
Vilnius and Pravieniškės.
A Halfway House is a special structural unit
of a penitentiary or remand home, the main
127
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents