Time to raise AWI practice to a new level

Twenty years after the first provisions of the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 came into force, and with essential law reform processes of the last few years now stalled, it becomes evermore challenging for lawyers, individually and collectively, to deliver an adequate service to promote and safeguard the rights, welfare and interests of people with mental and intellectual disabilities. This webinar will explain why and how legal practice now must raise its game to new levels. Particular topics include these:
• Experience of the pandemic has emphasised, rather than creating, institutional ageism and disability discrimination. Is weariness causing the profession to be complicit in unlawfulness and breach of fundamental rights, often resource-driven? How can we best tackle these issues?
• In particular, are we adequately safeguarding all vulnerable victims of Scotland’s notorious blind spot in relation to unlawful deprivations of liberty? Collectively, are we ensuring that all who are entitled to remedies, including compensation, under Articles 5.4 and 5.5. of ECHR obtain them?
• What are the effects of the current drive towards incorporation of UN human rights instruments into Scots law, and the precedents being set by senior courts as to their effects pre-incorporation?
• Using alternatives to guardianship is mandatory, not optional, but limited in practice by myths, some in official quarters, about the scope of alternatives.
• Sixteen going on seventeen: “I need someone older and wiser” – have we wised up sufficiently to the confusion caused by treating “young persons” as adults for some purposes, and children for others?
• With legislation following upon the Scott Review not expected for some 4-5 years, and with indications already of possible interim legislation in 2022, what – after the election – can be predicted as being possibly “on the agenda” for early law reform?
• In light of all the foregoing, the webinar will re-visit the basic principles and provisions of the 2000 Act, and describe particular deficiencies in practice that require to be identified and addressed when they arise.
• AWI law is not limited to the 2000 Act, and is intertwined with related areas of law. The webinar will look at some of these, and at aspects of the interplay among the 1968, 2000, 2003 and 2007 Acts.
 
Speaker Adrian Ward MBE
 
Originally recorded on 25.5.21