Prague, Nov 23 (CTK) – The Czech cabinet approved yesterday a plan to draft a bill to unify the care of endangered children and ban the placing of small children in institutional care, but the bill can hardly make it through parliament before next autumn’s end of the government mandate.
The Czech Republic has been criticised by domestic experts as well as international institutions for the high number of children in institutional care.
According to the Child and Family association, the Czech Republic is the last European country where children under three can be sent to children’s homes.
In accordance with the recommendation that the government’s human rights council made last year, the new bill will unify the currently fragmented system of endangered children care under a single ministry and gradually ban the placing of small children in children’s homes.
The government wants the bill to be drafted by the end of June 2017.
Afterwards, the ministers will be holidaying and the Chamber of Deputies, too, will meet only in September after the summer recess. Since it usually takes the lawmakers several weeks to discuss and pass a bill, they are unlikely to pass the bill on endangered children care before the general election probably due in October.
The next cabinet may take up the bill, but the whole legislative process would have to start from the beginning.
The bill will allow to place children in institutional care only exceptionally and it will bind the state to help the children’s own family or a step family care for them.
The ban would come into force gradually, beginning with infants under one year and continuing with children under three and seven.
The bill will move the whole system under the jurisdiction of the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry, which will no longer share the responsibility with the Education and Health Ministries.
The government human rights council said the fragmentation makes the system ineffective. The Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia are the only EU countries in which a single ministry is not in charge of the whole agenda, the council said.
