Jillian van Turnhout (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 6:

In page 15, to delete lines 10 to 36 and substitute the following:“3. (1) Legal capacity may be exercised:

(a) by the relevant person with decision-making supports as needed (including a decision-making assistant) and/or reasonable accommodation; or

(b) by the relevant person and their co-decision maker, acting jointly; or

(c) in a situation of last resort, where all efforts to ascertain the relevant person’s will and preferences have been made and the relevant person’s will and preferences remain not known, legal capacity may be exercised by the person(s) selected to represent the relevant person in exercising the relevant person’s legal capacity (i.e. decision-making representative, attorney, or patient-designated healthcare representative in advance healthcare directive).

(2) Where legal capacity is exercised with the support of a decision-making assistant, codecision-maker, or is being made by a person selected to represent the relevant person (decision-making representative, attorney, or patient-designated healthcare representative), and where the relevant person’s will and preferences are not known, the decision shall be guided by the individual’s best interpretation of the relevant person’s will or preferences and how these are to be applied to a specific decision(s).

(3) In applying subsection (2), decision-making assistants, co-decision-makers and persons selected to represent the relevant person must be able to provide a reasonable account of how this interpretation was arrived at.”.

I propose this amendment to change the definition of "capacity" in the Bill and to move away from a functional test of mental capacity which is used in the current text of the Bill to deny the legal capacity both of adults with disabilities or mental health experiences and of older people. The amendment would replace the definition of "mental capacity" in the Bill with a recognition of the legal capacity which all adults enjoy.

This amendment is based on the explicit recognition of legal capacity and the principle set out by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that a functional assessment of mental capacity should never be used to restrict or deny a person’s legal capacity, even in respect of a single decision. The amendment draws on a proposal contained in A Statutory Framework for the Right to Legal Capacity and Supported Decision-Making by the Canadian Association for Community Living, CACL, which was published in 2012. The CACL was a key actor in the reform of Canadian adult guardianship law in the 1990s.It resulted in innovative statutory mechanisms such as co-decision-making and representative decision-making agreements, which influenced the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Bill here.

Functional assessments of mental capacity are now understood to violate human rights. In the terms of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, functional assessments of mental capacity are "discriminatorily applied to people with disabilities". In April 2014 the committee stated:

[The] functional approach is flawed for two key reasons. The first is that it is discriminatorily applied to people with disabilities. The second is that it presumes to be able to accurately assess the inner-workings of the human mind and to then deny a core human right – the right to equal recognition before the law – when an individual does not pass the assessment. In all these approaches, a person's disability and/or decision-making skills are taken as legitimate grounds for denying his or her legal capacity and lowering his or her status as a person before the law. Article 12 does not permit such discriminatory denial of legal capacity, but rather requires that support be provided in the exercise of legal capacity.

Instead of requiring a person who needs support with decision-making to undergo an assessment of his or her mental capacity, these supports should be provided for the person to avail of at his or her own discretion. The availability of supports should also be combined with a parallel process to explore the person's will and preferences, something we have debated quite a lot on the floor of the House, so that the decision the person wishes to make becomes clear. This approach avoids any need for an assessment of mental capacity.

Section 3 of the Bill makes a person's ability to enter into different support arrangements contingent on the individual's mental capacity. This is quite a high standard for an individual to reach and will mean that some people will not be found eligible to make assisted decision-making agreements and co-decision-making agreements, even where this is the form of support the individual and his or her supporters would most likely use.

Under the Bill in its current form, the term "presumption of capacity" is used to try to prevent discriminatory application of functional assessments of mental capacity. However, two international human rights scholars, Oliver Lewis and Michael Bach, stated at a meeting in Belfast in April 2014 that a presumption of mental capacity is meaningless as it does not help to protect the individual's human rights. They argue that the right to equal recognition before the law, from which the right to legal capacity stems, is a guarantee, not a presumption. In contrast, a presumption can be rebutted if evidence is provided to demonstrate that a certain individual is not worthy of equal recognition before the law.

This amendment is required to ensure Ireland meets its obligations under international human rights law and will, upon ratification, comply with Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which we all wish to do. This is why I have tabled the amendment.