The Constitutional Court decided that Part 1 of Article 13 of the Law "On Psychiatric Care" (admission of a person to a psychiatric facility) was inconsistent with Article 29 of the Constitution of Ukraine (right to liberty and safety) and that the Parliament should amend the legislation in the mental health care area in accordance with this decision.

The Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Valeriya Lutkovska stressed that "the hospitalisation of an incapacitated person without his/her consent when he/she cannot give such a consent because of health conditions and cannot leave a psychiatric facility any time of own free will equals to confinement because a person is kept in a confined space for a long time without his/her consent, according to paragraph 1 of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights."

This Constitutional Court's decision constitutes a transformative change of the mental health care system in Ukraine and provides a solid ground for further legislative changes that aim at transforming punishment into treatment in prison mental health services and at protecting rights of people with mental health problems.

To attract attention to the systemic problems in the field of the mental health care system and to the need for fundamental changes, the Ombudsperson's Office and UNDP supported first-ever international assessment of the mental health and forensic psychiatric services system in Ukraine that resulted in the development of a long-term vision for the sector.

Dealing with the issue, the Ombudsperson conducts systematic day-to-day activities under the National Preventive Mechanism based on the "Ombudsman Plus" model, aimed at disclosing human rights violations. The monitoring finds serious violations of human rights in all oblasts of Ukraine.

One of the latest monitoring was conducted in Zakarpattia oblast, where a regional coordinator of the Ombudsperson discovered serious human rights violations at the oblast mental hospital in the village of Vilshany. A mentally healthy old man was illegally treated at the psychiatric hospital in the same ward with patients with an open form of tuberculosis for a year.

Oleh Hryhoriev, the Ombudsperson's Regional Coordinator who restored the rights of this old man, emphasised that, "the diagnosis of the man was not confirmed by laboratory tests. He was absolutely mentally healthy, but had been illegally treated at the psychiatric hospital for a year. We had to stop these human rights violations at the hospital."

With the assistance of UNDP, the Ombudsperson's Regional Coordinators conducted 148 NPM visits in 2015.