In 2010, Disability Rights International filed an "urgent appeal" to the United Nations to stop the use of electric shocks as punishment against children with disabilities at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts. DRI called it "Torture not Treatment" and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture agreed.
The shocks were banned on new admissions to the school - but left those already receiving shocks still painfully suffering all these years later.
DRI has now filed a petition against the United States before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights - to demand that the United States impose a federal ban on this barbaric practice and end the use of shocks on all children.
Read The Guardian's coverage of this case here.
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