The B.C. Civil Liberties Association says it wants to challenge Canada's assisted-suicide laws alone. The BCCLA represents four plaintiffs seeking to change Canada's assisted-suicide laws, including a dying woman who won the right to have her trial expedited because her health is failing. Gloria Taylor suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. On Wednesday, a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled Taylor's trial should be heard in November because of the woman's rapidly deteriorating condition. A similar lawsuit is simultaneously being brought forward by the Farewell Foundation. The group's co-founder Russell Ogden is lobbying to join the BCCLA's lawsuit if its own challenge is struck down. Ogden argues testimony from his application should be part of the civil liberties association's case because it's unfair to assess the quality of either challenge.
The order by Mr Justice Baker was issued in a case involving a woman, who can be referred to only as "M". She has been in "a minimally conscious state" since suffering from swelling of the brain stem, which caused serious damage and wasting to the brain. The woman suffered the illness in 2003, when she was 43, and has been minimally conscious since then.
Anti-abortion campaigners have won a High Court challenge to clarify government guidelines on abortion in Northern Ireland. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (Spuc) claimed guidance to health professionals was misleading and legally inaccurate. The High Court ruled the Department of Health's guidelines be withdrawn. The court found the guidelines failed to deal properly with counselling and conscientious objection. The judge, Lord Justice Girvan, stopped short of quashing the document issued by the Department of Health in March. Spuc was seeking a declaration that the decision to publish the advice to health professionals was unlawful.
A man who is almost completely paralysed is taking legal action in a bid to end his life. His solicitors have told the BBC that they believe his case could have major implications for the way prosecutors in England, Wales and Northern Ireland deal with assisted suicides.
A mother is seeking a court's permission to withdraw life-sustaining artificial nutrition and hydration from her brain-damaged daughter. The woman, 53, who can only be referred to as "M" for legal reasons, is in a "minimally conscious state".
A 22-stone ex-policeman has lost his Court of Appeal fight to force a health authority to fund obesity surgery. Tom Condliff, 62, said he needed a gastric bypass operation to save his life after becoming obese due to the drugs he takes for long-term diabetes. The Stoke-on-Trent man challenged a decision by North Staffordshire PCT to refuse to fund the procedure. Court judges expressed "considerable sympathy" but ruled the funding policy did not breach human rights laws. Lord Justice Toulson, one of three judges sitting on Wednesday, said: "Anyone in his situation would feel desperate." Mr Condliff, of Talke, who has a body mass index (BMI) of 43 - not high enough under his PCT's rules to qualify for surgery - lost a High Court battle over the decision in April. But his lawyers had argued the PCT had applied a funding policy which was legally flawed and breached his human rights.
A one-year-old boy at the centre of a "right-to-life" legal dispute would not benefit from an operation to help him breathe, the High Court has been told. The child, known as Baby RB, has a rare, genetic condition that makes it hard for him to breathe independently. But a leading paediatrician, known as Dr F, said he was "not a candidate" for surgery to try to open up his airway. Baby RB's father is fighting a hospital's attempt - backed by the mother - to withdraw his life support.
A doctor has agreed a baby in a "right-to-life" legal row may be able to interact - but any mental development would only make his fate more tragic. The paediatric neurologist told the High Court the severely disabled child, Baby RB, would remain in a "no chance" situation even if he developed further. He questioned the life the boy would lead if he was capable of cognitive function but physically so disabled.
A doctor has said that a baby in a "right-to-life" legal row has the potential to communicate and even operate a wheelchair in years to come. The paediatric neurologist, Professor Fenella Kirkham, told the High Court that Baby RB had the normal intelligence of a one-year-old. She said he was likely to develop language recognition skills and he may be better off at home. The boy's father is fighting an attempt by the hospital to end life support.
A father who had been fighting to stop a hospital withdrawing life support from his seriously ill son has dropped his objections. The one-year-old, known as Baby RB for legal reasons, was born with a rare, genetic muscle condition that makes it hard for him to breathe independently. The hospital was backed by the baby's mother. But the move had been strongly opposed by the child's father at a High Court hearing. However, the father changed his mind after hearing medical evidence which suggested it would be in the best interests of the child if medical support was withdrawn. Lawyers for the health authority caring for the baby in intensive care told Mr Justice McFarlane: "All of the parties in court now agree that it would be in RB's best interests for the course suggested by the doctors to be followed."
A father is fighting a hospital's attempt to withdraw support keeping his baby son alive. The one-year-old, known as Baby RB for legal reasons, was born with a rare, genetic muscle condition that makes it hard for him to breathe independently. His parents are going to the High Court - the mother is reportedly supporting the hospital's bid. The father's lawyers argue that the boy's brain is unaffected, meaning he can see, hear, interact and play. Despite having to remain in hospital and being dependent on a ventilator to breathe, he enjoys having stories read to him and listening to music, they say. The lawyers are submitting video footage to the court, which they say shows him playing with his toys. But the hospital says that Baby RB's quality of life is so low that it would not be in his best interests to try to save him. Baby RB was born with congenital myasthenic syndrome and has been in hospital since birth.
A father who went to the High Court to try to stop a hospital turning off his seriously ill baby son's life support machine has dropped his objections to the move. The outcome has prompted a mixture of sadness and relief. For six days they had sat in the bland surroundings of Court 50 at London's High Court listening to others talking about their baby son's quality of life. A host of paediatricians, nurses, and experts went into the witness box. Many of them urged a judge to decide that this profoundly disabled 13-month-old boy should be allowed to die. It was, they said, no longer in his best interests to keep him alive.
Parents battling to keep their seriously ill baby alive have failed to overturn a ruling allowing him to die. The nine-month-old boy has a rare metabolic disorder and has suffered brain damage and respiratory failure. The couple had appealed against a judge's ruling on Thursday that it was in the boy's best interests to withdraw his "life sustaining treatment". The High Court ruling gives doctors at an unnamed NHS trust powers to turn off the ventilator keeping "baby OT" alive.
A man serving a life sentence for a double murder has won a High Court victory over his right to have cosmetic surgery on the NHS. Denis Harland Roberts, 59, currently in a Co Durham jail for killing an elderly couple in East Sussex in 1989, wanted treatment to remove a birthmark. An undisclosed policy operated by Justice Secretary Jack Straw had restricted non-urgent inmate treatment. The case may mean other inmates are considered for similar treatments. However, the Prison Service said it was still "entitled to refuse escorts to hospital on grounds of risk". On Wednesday, London's High Court declared the justice secretary acted unlawfully and "contrary to good administration" in failing to disclose his full policy on medical appointments.
A couple have spoken of their shock after an IVF clinic mix-up led to their last embryo being wrongly implanted into another patient. They were further angered when it emerged the other woman was given the morning-after pill. The couple from Bridgend won their case for damages after the mistake at Cardiff's University Hospital of Wales. Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust apologised "unreservedly" for the error and said it had improved checking procedures. The trust admitted gross failures in care and has also agreed to pay an undisclosed settlement to the couple.
The Supreme Court in the US state of Montana is due to begin hearing arguments to decide if severely ill people there have the constitutional right to ask their doctor to help them die. A lower court judgement last December decided that they did, but now the state of Montana is trying to have that ruling overturned.
Plans to relax the laws on assisted suicide have been thrown into doubt after a group of lawyers questioned the role of Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Britain’s most senior judge. Lawyers from campaign group the Christian Legal Centre want the advice to be put on hold because of Lord Phillips’ personal sympathy those calling for the rules on assisted suicide to be realxed, which emerged weeks after the judgement was handed down.
A controversial court that still holds its hearing in private will decide tomorrow whether a pregnant woman with learning difficulties should be forcibly sterilised once she gives birth. Health workers from a local NHS trust and council, who cannot be named for legal reasons, have asked the secretive Court of Protection to decide whether the woman should be forced to have her fallopian tubes cut to stop her falling pregnant again.
Official website of the Irish Courts service. Full text archive of Supreme Court (from 2001), Court of Criminal Appeal (from 2004) and High Court (from 2003) judgments are posted on the site as soon as they are available from the Courts Service
Debbie Purdy, who wants her husband to accompany her to Switzerland for an assisted suicide without fear of prosecution, took her case to the United Kingdom’s highest court, the House of Lords, for a final appeal this week. Ms Purdy, who has progressive multiple sclerosis, scored an important victory on the first day of the two day hearing, when the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, conceded that article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private life, applies to cases like hers.
Twenty-five years ago it was common practice to bring about the deaths of some children with learning disabilities or physical impairments. This paper considers a small number of landmark cases in the early 1980s that confronted this practice. These cases illustrate a process by which external forces (social, philosophical, political, and professional) moved through the legal system to effect a profound change outside that system – primarily in the (then) largely closed domain of medical conduct/practice. These cases are considered from a socio-legal perspective. In particular, the paper analyses the reasons why they surfaced at that time, the social and political contexts that shaped the judgments, and their legacy.
Doctors have the right and the ethical responsibility to pull patients off life support if they decide treatment is futile – and should not need patient or family consent to do so, lawyers for two doctors at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital will argue in Ontario’s highest court. The Court of Appeal’s decision will not only determine the fate of a man who has been comatose in a Toronto hospital for most of the time since he moved to Canada from Iran, it could have wide-ranging implications for the ability of patients to determine the course of their treatment and the right of medical professionals to make those decisions.
Days after an Israeli court made a landmark ruling allowing the family of a deceased 17-year-old girl to harvest and freeze the eggs from her ovaries, the family has apparently bowed to domestic pressure to drop efforts to push ahead with the procedure. The family of Chen Aida Ayish, who was gravely injured in a car crash 10 days ago, had appealed to the court to extract her eggs after doctors declared her brain dead, Israeli media had reported. The court's ruling was unprecedented in Israel, and possibly globally, but immediately sparked a backlash from religiously conservative communities in Israel, a source familiar with the case said yesterday, prompting the family not to take the case any further. Ms Ayish, 17, fell into a coma after she was hit by a car 10 days ago. Doctors at the Kfar Saba hospital pronounced her brain dead last Wednesday, and her parents decided to donate her organs, and probe the possibility of harvesting her eggs.
Marcia Angell was an editor of the most prestigious medical journal in the world for two decades. She currently gives monthly lectures on ethics to faculty at Harvard Medical School. And she served on a panel that gave advice on medical issues to the White House. But Dr. Angell’s credentials were challenged, Wednesday, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia when a lawyer for the federal Department of Justice tried to prevent her affidavit from being entered in a case concerning physician-assisted suicide.
A father whose son was born with a rare neuromuscular condition will go to the high court tomorrow in an attempt to stop a hospital withdrawing the support that keeps the child alive. Doctors treating the one-year-old say the boy's quality of life is so poor that it would not be in his best interests to save him. They are reportedly being supported in their action by the baby's mother, who is separated from his father. The child, known for legal reasons as Baby RB, was born with congenital myasthenic syndrome (CMS), a muscle condition that severely limits movement and the ability to breathe independently. He has been in hospital since birth. If the hospital succeeds in its application, it will be the first time a British court has gone against the wishes of a parent and ruled that life support can be discontinued or withdrawn from a child who does not have brain damage.
The European Court of Human Rights found a violation of the Article 8 right of an HIV-positive opthalmic nurse whose electronic health records were accessed by her colleagues (who were not involved in her medical care), after which her employment contract was not renewed.
The sperm sample of a person undergoing chemotherapy treatment, stored by a hospital for his benefit for future use in case the treatment made him infertile, was property owned by him whose loss or damage entitled him to bring an action for negligence. Moreover, where the circumstances showed there was a bailment of the sperm to the hospital unit storing it, a cause of action for bailment could arise for its loss or damage sounding in damages for psychiatric injury and/or mental distress.
South Africa has decided to stop the automatic renewal of international investment agreements that it signed in the early post-apartheid period, and has announced that some will be terminated. It is right to do so, and other countries, one hopes, will follow suit.
English language discussions of countries in which euthanasia is, to varying degrees, legalised, or in which the courts had to pronounce themselves on the issue, even though often in the end rejecting any legalisation of active euthanasia, rarely include any mention of Colombia.1 However, a look at the legal status of euthanasia in Colombia is interesting and thought-provoking, given that, at least to this author's knowledge, Colombia is the only country in which active euthanasia was, to some extent, decriminalised by a Constitutional Court decision,2 based on human rights arguments.
Frances Swaine and Merry Varney are instructed by David Tracey, whose wife, Janet Tracey, sadly died in Addenbrooke’s Hospital on 7 March 2011. Following her admission to Addenbrooke’s, a ‘Do Not Attempt Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation Order’ (known as a DNACPR or DNR) was placed on Janet’s medical notes. Janet was unaware of the DNACPR and when she became aware of it several days later, she clearly stated it was against her wishes and that she wanted to be resuscitated. As a result the DNACPR was cancelled. Several days later however a further DNACPR was entered onto her records. We have issued a judicial review and human rights claim against the NHS Trust responsible for Addenbrooke’s and against the Secretary of State for Health seeking Declarations from the Court that the Trust’s policy on the use of DNACPR is unlawful, and for the Secretary of State for Health to issue national guidance for patients and their families to know their rights concerning the use of DNACPRs.
The 44-year-old, a former international consultant, opted to take her daughter, 9, out of the immunisation programme run at her private school because she had reservations about the safety of the vaccine. After spending hours researching it and speaking with friends in the medical profession, she decided that not enough was known about the long-term effects of the vaccine, and that her child, who has no medical problems, should not have it.
The NHS's spending watchdog acted unlawfully when it decided to restrict access to drugs that could help thousands of older women with the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, the high court ruled today. A judge ruled that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) wrongly failed to disclose the economic reasoning behind a decision in October to restrict the supply of strontium ranelate, a drug manufactured by Servier laboratories under the brand name Protelos.
Three years ago, Trudy Moore found that her daughter, Samantha, conceived using her husband’s sperm and her sister as a surrogate, was not a genetic match to her husband. Frantic for answers, she confronted her doctor, who suggested in e-mails to Ms. Moore that he may have contaminated her husband’s sample – possibly with 3168.
Politically strident debates surrounding end-of-life decisionmaking have surfaced once again, this time across the Atlantic in Italy. Eluana Englaro died early this year after a prolonged court fight, causing the international press to compare her case to that of Theresa Marie Schiavo, who passed away in 2005 in Florida after nearly sparking constitutional crises on both state and federal levels. In many respects, the facts of Ms. Englaro’s case are similar to Schiavo, but a close analysis of Englaro leads to the surprising conclusion that the Italian Court of Cassazione in that case actually enunciated a broader, stronger right to make end-of-life decisions than has the United States Supreme Court thus far in America.
A sample of sperm from a person undergoing chemotherapy, which a hospital stored in case he became infertile after the treatment, was that person’s property and its loss or damage was capable of establishing a claim in negligence. Further, where the hospital’s storage was undertaken gratuitously in the sense that it was a bailee of the sperm, any breach of duty in its safe storage causing loss or damage entitled the owner to recover damages in bailment for psychiatric injury and/or mental distress.
A trainee teacher with primary refractory Hodgkin’s lymphoma has launched a High Court action against her primary care trust, NHS Surrey, which has refused to pay for her treatment with an unlicensed drug. Philippa Bigham, aged 28, from Frimley, Surrey, has been given a prognosis of two years’ survival without a bone marrow transplantation. But her medical team at the Royal Free Hospital in London want her to have treatment with radiolabelled basiliximab, a monoclonal antibody conjugated with radioactive iodine and also known as CHT-25, before she has the transplantation. The primary care trust has refused to pay for the drug, which costs £3000 ({euro}3500; $4900) for a course of treatment. Basiliximab is licensed in the United Kingdom for use in renal transplant rejection but the radiolabelled version is not yet licensed.