How many people with disabilities are in institutions in Europe? What are governments doing about it? And is it working?
These are basic but crucial questions.
Unfortunately, we don’t get many answers.
Monitoring deinstitutionalisation
That was the starting point for a discussion on monitoring deinstitutionalisation, organised by the EEG in Brussels on 20 October 2026. The discussion was organised together with the European Commission’s departments for justice and for employment.
Speakers from the European Commission, EU agencies and EEG members brought their perspectives about monitoring deinstitutionalisation.
Ana Carla Pereira of the European Commission framed the discussion around the Commission’s guidance on independent living, which has a lot to say about monitoring. The guidance has a whole section on monitoring progress:
- It says governments need better data on how many people live in institutions and how they live, broken down by age, gender and type of disability.
- It says governments need to have a plan: a clear timeframe, targets for closing institutions and for the number of people moving to community-based services, a budget, and a way to review progress.
- People with disabilities and their organisations should be involved at every stage, including monitoring and evaluation.
- And, the guidance also says, “the results of evaluation and monitoring should be made publicly available”.
The guidance also says that EU-wide surveys do not count people living in institutions. Eurostat is testing a way to include them in the European health interview survey. The earliest this could happen is 2031.
What governments should know and report
I was asked to give my view on what monitoring deinstitutionalisations should be about. I said monitoring deinstitutionalisation means governments and organisations providing answers in three areas:
1. The scale of the problem
How many institutions are there? How many people have to live in them?
And, what happens when abuse comes to light, as it did recently in Poland? (Poland is not the only country, and this is not the only case.) Who follows up?
2. What governments are doing
There are many deinstitutionalisation initiatives, but little information about them.
As I was leaving Slovakia last week, I got a message they just closed an institution in Adamovské Kochanovce. It should be the fourth in the country, I’m told. Not that you can find much information about it.
In another example, Czechia has closed several institutions over the past 10 to 15 years. To name a few from memory: Vyšší Hrádek, Nová Horka, Jinošov, Stod, Pístina… there’s more. More recently, Svojšice closed in 2022, and 116 people moved out to new setting.
Most of this is paid for with EU money. But there is no proper reporting on how this was done, or what the results were. Czech deputy minister said at our conference in 2022 the ministry does not know how many institutions were closed… (They still don’t, by the way.)
It does not help that you won’t find this kind of information in the reports informing deinstitutionalisation policies at European level. For example a widely quoted report by Eurofound (published two years after Svojšice) says that the number of adults with disabilities in institutions fell by 7% from 2016 to 2022, but it doesn’t mention a single one of the closed institutions. It doesn’t provide any information about the newly created community mental health centres (PDF), either.
3. Life after the institution
Are people living independently and included in their communities? What does a good life actually look like, and do people have the support to enjoy it?
Those are questions that need answers too. Just look at this: Romania reporting a number of people in institutions decreasing (because they were given money to leave) – but nobody knows what happened to them and what their situation is after they left.
A long way to go
During the discussion, many of the speakers said that “just monitoring the basic numbers isn’t enough”. Not enough for who?
For people living in institutions, the basic numbers are not a technicality. They decide whether anyone notices them at all.
Today, governments or EU surveys don’t count them. Institutions close and nobody writes down how, or what happened to the people who lived there.
So yes, we need more than numbers. We need to know whether people who left institutions now have a home, support, work and friends: a life they choose.
But we can’t skip the basics on the way. A government that doesn’t report how many people it keeps in institutions can hide from its responsibility to end segregation.
Milan Šveřepa, Chief Executive, Inclusion Europe