You must, by now, have heard of the Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi. Just in case you haven’t (really?), here’s a potted biography: having set up the secularist forum Free Saudi Liberals, he was arrested for insulting Islam and showing disobedience. Among the formal charges he faced was one for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi. […]
Category: Law
Bye-Bye Saatchi Bill?
It would appear that Lord Saatchi’s Medical Innovation Bill is toast. The Lib Dems, who are reportedly the ones to have vetoed it, are nevertheless being mealy-mouthed about something they should be proclaiming from the rooftops: the Bill is/ was needless at best, and possibly dangerous. But, hey: there’s an election coming up, and cancer treatment […]
Strange Happenings in Belgium
There’s a part of me that recognises this story as having been in the news before – but I don’t think I’ve written on it, so here we go. It’s from the Telegraph, under the headline “Son Challenges Belgian Law after Mother’s ‘Mercy Killing’” – which is a reasonably pithy summation of what’s at issue. A […]
A Bit More on Nonhuman Persons
A bit of a followup to my last post: sometimes, nonhumans are granted habeas corpus: Orangutans have been granted the status of “non-human persons” with legal rights in a landmark court ruling in Argentina. The decision clears the way for Sandra, a shy 29-year-old, to be freed from Buenos Aires Zoo after spending her entire life in […]
Rights, Duties, and Species
A little earlier this year, there was a case brought before the New York courts concerning a chimpanzee called Tommy: the matter was the lawfulness of keeping Tommy confined. Acting on Tommy’s behalf was an organisation called the NonHuman Rights Project. The legal documentation filed is available here. The basis of the case was not so […]
Saatchi Bill – Update
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It turns out that the version of the Medical Innovation Bill about which I wrote this morning isn’t the most recent: the most recent version is available here. Naïvely, I’d assumed that the government would make sure the latest version was the easiest to find. Silly me. Here’s the updated version […]
An Innovation Too Far?
NB – Update/ erratum here. Ooops. One of the things I’ve been doing since I last posted here has involved me looking at the Medical Innovation Bill – the so-called “Saatchi Bill”, after its titular sponsor. Partly, I got interested out of necessity – Radio 4 invited me to go on to the Sunday programme to talk […]
How Not to Argue against a Proposed Law
Yes, yes: it’s tedious and internecine, but it’s almost a year since I had a pop at Kevin Yuill’s book on assisted dying; how about an update? Well, conveniently, there’s this, in which he tries “to convince my fellow liberal minded atheists to reconsider their support for legalized assisted dying”. OK, then. First up, this isn’t […]
What should we Think about Belgium’s Child Euthanasia Law?
With any luck, the nuts real-world work schedule of the past few months* will begin to ease in a few days, so I should be able to start blogging more frequently soon; but I thought I’d take a moment out from writing jurisprudence lectures to do some thinking out loud about Belgium’s recent change to […]
Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust v James: Best Interests and Futility under the Judicial Microscope
Guest post by Daniel Sokol, barrister at 12 King’s Bench Walk / King’s College London. Eight years after coming into force, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 has finally reached the scrutiny of the Supreme Court in Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust v James [2013] UKSC 67. David James was a professional musician, and a family […]