Many provisions of the Mental Health Act are incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and should be changed, according to the Law Society of Ireland.
Proposals for change are contained in a report, Mental Health: The case for Reform, published yesterday by the society's Law Reform Committee. It has been submitted to the Department of Health and Children.
Mr Brian Gallagher, a member of the committee which drew up the report, said: "The rights of children have received long-deserved attention in recent years. The Law Society wishes to put the rights of the mentally ill at the top of the agenda. They have languished at the bottom for too long."
The report supports many of the reforms proposed in the Government's 1995 White Paper, A New Mental Health Act, and calls for their immediate adoption into law. It argues that the Mental Health Review Board proposed by the Government should be given extensive powers to overturn committal decisions.
The board should also be given extensive powers to review decisions made on behalf of patients who cannot make decisions for themselves.
It also proposes that measures be introduced to protect people with mental illnesses from abuse, neglect or exploitation. As part of this it suggests that the courts be given the power to make adult care orders, similar to child care orders, to protect vulnerable patients.
Among its other proposals are: that the criteria for involuntary commitment to a mental institution be more clearly defined; that everyone should have a right to a minimum level of psychiatric treatment; that greater safeguards be given to people who commit themselves to a mental institution voluntarily; that the proposed mental health review board be able to order "planned discharges"; and that legally aided representation be provided for patients appearing before this board.