On October 31 2022, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) published its decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland. Mrs. Coppin is 73 years old and spent her early life in state-funded, religious-run carceral institutions. She was born in a county home to a teenage single mother. Aged two, she was taken from her mother and a judge committed her to an industrial school. As a teenager, between 1964 and 1968, she was held in three different Magdalene laundries. A child, separated from family, she was entirely dependent on those in charge of the institutions; religious women of high social status, who regularly reminded her that she was considered an unwanted product of her mother’s sin. They subjected her to arbitrary detention, exhausting forced labour, neglect, unsanitary living conditions, denial of identity, denial of privacy and ritual humiliation. She has lived with the mental health consequences ever since. Read full article...
