RECOMMENDATIONS cial workers and all other experts to apply these principles and standards on the practical level. In case, the judge or the prosecutor find there is no proper service in place or/and social workers and/or other experts are not prepared to apply properly the CRPD, the legal framework should allow them to recommend to the relevant authorities building such services or ensure capacity building of the social workers/other experts. • Social service providers and the Social Assistance Departments (which work with people with disabilities) should be involved in compulsory treatment proceedings and probation proceedings, because they are competent under the Social Assistance Act and the Persons with Disabilities Act. This is not a working model yet because the law does not explicitly require the court to refer to them. And a mechanism similar to the one in the Child Protection Act can and should be created. All alternative (to detention and compulsory treatment) options should be available to the court for people who are of such a complicated social status to be explored. Some of the interviewed judges already use this opportunity and share that Social Assistance Departments provide poor quality reports and no assistance while some service providers (NGOs) collect and process essential information about the person and gradually start to work on case management successfully (but still on a pilot project basis). Within the periodic court review of the compulsory treatment (every six months, under Art. 432 of the Criminal Procedure Code), the court may direct information and counselling to the social services under the new Social Services Act, as long as such have been created. The provider of such a service can make an actual and adequate assessment of the person’s needs. There are already some under a pilot project of the Global Initiative in Psychiatry (NGO). Usually the assessment provided by the Social Assistance Department is useless because it only contains information about the person’s age, address, pension amount, social security and tax status and nothing about the actual challenges in his/her life situation. Judges need a connection to a person’s support network in order to order release from inpatient compulsory treatment. But finding or building such a network takes months or years in the majority of the cases. The judicial authorities actively must seek for innovative practices based on CRPD application and when identify such, to take proactive actions to inform the judges and prosecutors for them. • The judges mentioned that a good practice would be to develop transitional services that function like a small settlement where the person is prepared for life in freedom. • When a forensic psychiatric assessment establishes an illness/condition, but not criminal irresponsibility, it should be sent together with the effective sentence to the prison, for special health care measures during the execution of the sentence. Bulgarian Helsinki Committee 67