Report on the State of Human Rights in Institutions for Persons with Disabilities Unfortunately, neither the multidisciplinary teams nor the Social Service Agency have launched inquiries into possible cases of neglect of the best interest and educational needs of children by parents of childrens with disabilities. In contrast, the monitoring group noticed that, in most cases, the staff places the full responsibility for violating children’s interest on parents. For example, according to the staff of the Public School No. 203, a parent of beneficiary T.Kh. prohibits him/her from using the sign language at home, as well as from communicating with other hearing impaired children in the school who use the sign language. Despite the fact that, according to professionals’ assessment, this constitutes a violation of the child’s genuine interest, the school staff has not taken any effective measures in this respect. According to the staff of the Public School No. 203, none of the university entrants with hearing impairment has passed the national entrance exams for the past five years, an important cause of which is a delay in learning the sign language and academic backwardness developed on this basis. The aforementioned information and the cases discussed above indicate to important shortcomings of the programs of rehabilitation/habilitation that exist in the specialized schools, as well as to problems in the work of the multidisciplinary teams which can cause unfounded institutionalization of children with disabilities. For the psychologist of the Kojori Institution for Children with Disabilities, this institution is his/her first employer after graduating from university. Accordingly, working with children with special needs without supervision is a particularly difficult challenge for him/her. There is no multidisciplinary team in the institution; For this reason, the work of specialists of different fields is not coordinated, the children’s individual development plans are incomplete, and entries made by the psychologist are very scarce. Due to the lack of resources in the institution, it is common practice for NGOs to offer certain services free of charge. However, as the monitoring group has documented, this practice may pose a danger of administering a low quality service and, consequently, of violating the beneficiaries’ rights. The Case of D.I. In the Martkopi Boarding House for Persons with Disabilities, the psychologist mainly conducts the following activities: learning poetry, knitting and embroidery, table games, painting, ball games, etc. Despite the fact that the aforementioned activities may be generally useful for planning the free time of beneficiaries, they are not the only manifestation of a psychologist’s typical work in institutions of this type. According to the psychologist, a large number of the beneficiaries have such severe behavioral disorders that s/he is not able to work with them at all. For the aforementioned psychologist, too, the Martkopi Boarding House for Persons with Disabilities was the first professional experience of this type. During the monitoring, it was established that the psychologist of the Tbilisi Infant House had only worked in this institution for less than a month. According to him/her, programs of child habilitation are not implemented in the institution; there is no multidisciplinary team, and the work of the institution employees is not coordinated. The psychologist was not able to present documents describing his/her work. ANNUAL REPORT OF THE PUBLIC DEFENDER OF GEORGIA NPM Report 2012 During the monitoring of the Kojori Institution for Children with Disabilities, the group observed a massage procedure on nine-year-old D.I. which was conducted by a physical therapist assigned by one of the NGOs. (The child has severe mental retardation, ventriculoperitoneal shunting, pediatric cerebral palsy, right-sided hemiparesis, and epilepsy syndrome.)The physical therapist was not able to answer the monitors’ question about the child’s diagnosis. S/he was also unaware of such important details for the process of physical therapy as paresis side, condition of muscle tonus, the child’s functional status, etc. The specialist was also unable to say what method of physical rehabilitation s/he was using. The preventive group verified D.I.’s full medical documents on-site; as it turned out, all necessary information about his/her medical condition was included in the medical file. The aforementioned case gave rise to a well-founded doubt that the specialist had not got acquainted with D.I.’s condition before starting the therapeutic intervention, which could have caused possible damage to the child’s health.