I’ve just had a similar tribunal. In my comments above I was trying to find a consistent approach by arguing that on principle a patient in these circumstances is being confined and can’t give valid consent. It seems that the tribunal might have a policy of making sense of it in the other direction, along the lines of what Zac said at the start:
If you don’t agree, you’ll not get a conditional discharge.
If you do agree, it’s not deprivation of liberty, so if anything it will be a standard conditional discharge.
The first is based on their belief that a “deprivation of liberty” condition can’t be enforced except by recall, and the second is based on one reading of the European cases and AGNI. It’s hard to say for certain that there are any right or wrong answers. There might be exceptions, and it’s interesting that the MOJ envisage using supervised conditional discharge against the patient’s will (though I wonder whether that will happen).
Anyway, whether it’s right or not, it is effectively a return to the common sense we had before people started to take an interest in Article 5. If you want to get out of psychiatric hospital and agree to the proposed arrangements then you can.
So.. ‘you better agree, else life is harder for you’..is the message to certain patients.
Nothing new in that. I agreed to COVID jabs and signed consent forms to say I consented, else I would be unemployable.
It didn’t matter whether I felt a) ‘under pressure’ or b) ‘under duress’ or c) had no belief in the vaccine (as since Re:C ‘belief’ went out). As far as the system knew, once I agree that’s consent - all done and dusted.
So it seems there are two kinds of consent:
Where agreement is freely given after weighing things in the balance etc.
When agreement is given under pressure but irrelevant as nobody cares how agreement was arrived at.
If I was a patient of the types to be affected, I’d just say ‘yes’ which is what the system wants. I’d have a much easier life.
Apparently there are moves in process for the UK to disassociate from the ECHR and the UNCHR. That’s shouldn’t be news to anyone. If you don’t know about it, Google ‘Stop the boats’ which is the main driver.