France: Psychiatric Care, Human Rights, and the CRPD

Fifteen years after its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly, 10 years after its ratification by France, the appropriation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is judged severely by the UN monitoring Committee. This severity seems to be based not so much on the question of the application of an international standard but on that of the “human rights-based model of disability.” This criticism questions not only the modalities of dissemination of international legal norms, but also the non-reception of a model of disability that is presented as being based on the human rights norm. We are interested in this chapter in the specificities of France, for example, in a country that represents itself as a “country of human rights.” We focus on the issue of mental health laws. We look back at some of the elements that illustrate the poor reception of the Convention in the field of psychiatry and mental health in France, and more generally at the place taken by human rights in the history of psychiatry in France.