A court in Victoria has strengthened protections for mental health patients fighting forced electroconvulsive shock therapy, ruling that treatment orders cannot undermine a person’s human rights.

The court upheld an appeal brought by Victoria Legal Aid against two decisions in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (Vcat) and the Mental Health Tribunal that two patients who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia be subject to a course of ECT against their will.

Legal Aid’s acting program manager, Hamish McLachlan, said the appeal decision did not mean an end to compulsory ECT, but people subject to involuntary treatment orders would now have greater control over their care.

“What the supreme court has said is that mental health patients need to be treated on an equal basis with all other members of the community,” he said.

Both patients were held under a compulsory treatment order, authorised by the Victorian Mental Health Act, which states that treatment can only be imposed upon a person without their consent if they are incapable of giving consent and if there is no less restrictive way for that person to be treated. At all times treatment must be compatible with the person’s human rights.

In a 110-page judgment handed down in the supreme court in Melbourne on Thursday, Justice Kevin Bell said Vcat had misinterpreted the relevant provisions of the legislation and had failed to respect the two patients’ human rights.

He said the 2014 legislation was “a paradigm shift away from best-interests paternalism towards recognition of persons having mental illness as equal rights-bearers, not dependent welfare cases”.

Bell said the standard applied by the tribunal to determine whether the patients were capable of giving informed consent was higher than would be expected of a person who was not subject to an involuntary mental health treatment order, and was therefore discriminatory.

In one case, Bell said, the patient did not accept the diagnosis of schizophrenia but did accept having a range of severe mental illnesses that required treatment. He said denying or diminishing the extent of illness was not uncommon in people both with mental illness and without mental illness, and applying it as a determining factor of the ability to give informed consent in this case would be discriminatory.

“A person does not lack the capacity to give informed consent simply by making a decision that others consider to be unwise according to their individual values and situation,” he said. “To impose upon persons having mental illness a higher threshold of capacity, and to afford them less respect for personal autonomy and individual dignity, than people not having that illness, would be discriminatory.”

McLachlan said about 700 people underwent compulsory ECT in Victoria each year.

“This case wasn’t about whether ECT is good or bad; we at Legal Aid have clients who agree to have ECT and they report to us that they find it helpful,” he said. “What the case was about was ensuring that when people are faced with having ECT without their consent that their human rights are upheld in the process.”

The Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council’s chief executive, Maggie Toko, said Victoria should ban the non-consensual use of ECT because of the risks of “devastating” side effects including possible cognitive impairment.

“Some people tell us that ECT saved their life, and some people tell us that ECT ruined their life,” Toko said. “Both experiences are valid because ECT effects people differently. That’s why ECT remains controversial.”

She said there was not enough evidence supporting the use of ECT to justify it being used by force. “Compulsory ECT is never OK,” she said.