BBC and cages

Some problems are difficult to escape, especially when you live in a society that finds it necessary to highlight them. This is a situation the Czech Republic finds itself in owing to cage-like beds in institutions for people with mental disabilities. Three and a half years ago, British journalists visited Czech institutions for the first time, discovered cages with patients inside them and wrote a story about it, followed by protests from the famous writer J. K. Rowling. Now the British journalists, this time from the famous BBC, have returned. Again, they secretly entered the institutions and again, the information about mentally disabled people being kept in cages in the Czech Republic has been spread around the world. Moreover, with a tag saying such practice is officially banned in EU countries, including the Czech Republic.

Czechs can assure themselves a thousand times, referring to their psychiatric experts, that using cage-like beds is correct, but it does not make much sense. First of all, these experts were ignorant towards practices in psychiatric institutions under Communism and, as expected, they have retained their ignorance to date. Second, despite these experts' opinions, the EU has agreed that the right to close mentally ill people in cages cannot be based on their IQ. If we insist on using cages, we will be perceived as barbarians. Hence, a question: why does the Czech Republic want to be an EU member if it…