The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is a human rights treaty which sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children. The Convention defines a child as any human being under the age of eighteen, unless the age of majority is attained earlier under national legislation.
Abortion is legal under most circumstances in England and Wales and Scotland based on the Abortion Act 1967, then one of the most liberal abortion laws in Europe when it was enacted. Abortion is illegal in Northern Ireland except for saving the mother's life; Northern Ireland has one of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union.
Abortion in Ireland is regulated by the Health Act 2018. Abortion is permitted during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, and later in cases where the pregnant woman's life or health is at risk, or in the cases of a fatal foetal abnormality. Abortion services commenced on 1 January 2019 following its legalisation by the aforementioned Act, which became law on 20 December 2018. This law followed a constitutional amendment approved by a referendum in May 2018. This replaced the Eighth Amendment, which had given the life of the unborn foetus the same value as that of its mother, with a clause permitting the Oireachtas (parliament) to legislate for the termination of pregnancies. The constitutional amendment was signed into law on 18 September 2018.
Extradition is an act where one jurisdiction delivers a person accused or convicted of committing a crime in another jurisdiction, over to their law enforcement. It is a cooperative law enforcement process between the two jurisdictions and depends on the arrangements made between them. Besides the legal aspects of the process, extradition also involves the physical transfer of custody of the person being extradited to the legal authority of the requesting jurisdiction.
An ex post facto law is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences of actions that were committed, or relationships that existed, before the enactment of the law. In criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed; it may aggravate a crime by bringing it into a more severe category than it was in when it was committed; it may change the punishment prescribed for a crime, as by adding new penalties or extending sentences; or it may alter the rules of evidence in order to make conviction for a crime likelier than it would have been when the deed was committed.
The concept of justifiable homicide in criminal law stands on the dividing line between an excuse, a justification, and an exculpation. In certain circumstances, in most societies, homicide is justified when it prevents greater harm to innocents. A homicide can only be justified if there is sufficient evidence to prove that it was reasonable to believe that the offending party posed an imminent threat to the life or well-being of another, in so-called self-defense. A homicide in this instance is blameless and distinct from the less stringent criteria authorizing deadly force in stand your ground rulings.
The Human Rights Act 1998 (c42) is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom which received Royal Assent on 9 November 1998, and mostly came into force on 2 October 2000. Its aim was to incorporate into UK law the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights. The Act makes a remedy for breach of a Convention right available in UK courts, without the need to go to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.
A trial which is observed by trial judge without being partial is a fair trial. Various rights associated with a fair trial are explicitly proclaimed in Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights, as well as numerous other constitutions and declarations throughout the world. There is no binding international law that defines what is not a fair trial; for example, the right to a jury trial and other important procedures vary from nation to nation./
Children's rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to minors. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) defines a child as "any human being below the age of eighteen years, unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier." Children's rights includes their right to association with both parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for physical protection, food, universal state-paid education, health care, and criminal laws appropriate for the age and development of the child, equal protection of the child's civil rights, and freedom from discrimination on the basis of the child's race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, color, ethnicity, or other characteristics. Interpretations of children's rights range from allowing children the capacity for autonomous action to the enforcement of children being physically, mentally and emotionally free from abuse, though what constitutes "abuse" is a matter of debate. Other definitions include the rights to care and nurturing. There are no definitions of other terms used to describe young people such as "adolescents", "teenagers", or "youth" in international law, but the children's rights movement is considered distinct from the youth rights movement. The field of children's rights spans the fields of law, politics, religion, and morality.
Attorney General v X, [1992] IESC 1; [1992] 1 IR 1, was a landmark Irish Supreme Court case which established the right of Irish women to an abortion if a pregnant woman's life was at risk because of pregnancy, including the risk of suicide.
Lehideux and Isorni v. France, was a case heard by the European Court of Human Rights on punishing statements praising collaborators. In a judgement handed down 23 September 1998, the court has held by fifteen votes against six that the conviction of applicants for their article in favour of Philippe Pétain was prescribed by law and pursued a legitimate aim, but wasn't necessary in a democratic society and therefore violated Article 10.
Fetal rights are the moral rights or legal rights of the human fetus under natural and civil law. The term fetal rights came into wide usage after the landmark case Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion in the United States in 1973. The concept of fetal rights has evolved to include the issues of maternal drug and alcohol abuse. The only international treaty specifically tackling fetal rights is the American Convention on Human Rights which envisages the right to life of the fetus. While international human rights instruments lack a universal inclusion of the fetus as a person for the purposes of human rights, the fetus is granted various rights in the constitutions and civil codes of several countries. Many legal experts believe there is an increasing need to settle the legal status of the fetus.
Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to life. The article contains a limited exception for the cases of lawful executions and sets out strictly controlled circumstances in which the deprivation of life may be justified. The exemption for the case of lawful executions has been subsequently further restricted by Protocols 6 and 13, for those parties who are also parties to those protocols. The European Court of Human Rights has commented that "Article 2 ranks as one of the most fundamental provisions in the Convention". The obligations on a State under Article 2 consist of three principal aspects: the duty to refrain from unlawful deprivation of life; the duty to investigate suspicious deaths; and in certain circumstances, a positive obligation to take steps to prevent avoidable losses of life.
Article 2 – Right to life
1. Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.
2. Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary:
Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights is a provision of the European Convention which protects the right to a fair trial. In criminal law cases and cases to determine civil rights it protects the right to a public hearing before an independent and impartial tribunal within reasonable time, the presumption of innocence, and other minimum rights for those charged in a criminal case.
Abortion in Colombia is legal only in the following circumstances since 2006:
- The continuation of the pregnancy constitutes a danger to the life or health of the mother;
- The existence of life-threatening foetal malformations;
- The pregnancy is the result of rape, non-consensual artificial insemination or incest.
A, B and C v Ireland is a landmark 2010 case of the European Court of Human Rights on the right to privacy under Article 8. The court rejected the argument that article 8 conferred a right to abortion, but found that Ireland had violated the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to provide an accessible and effective procedure by which a woman can have established whether she qualifies for a legal abortion under current Irish law.
Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) states:
The restrictions permitted under this Convention to the said rights and freedoms shall not be applied for any purpose other than those for which they have been prescribed.
D v Ireland is a case of the European Court of Human Rights concerning abortion in Ireland. It refers to the court case itself, and the circumstances surrounding abortion for fatal foetal abnormalities in Ireland. In 2002 Deirdre Conroy discovered her pregnancy was non-viable and had a termination in Northern Ireland. A public letter, written using a pseudonym, asking for it to be legal was credited with influencing the 2002 abortion referendum. She lost a court case in the ECHR in 2006 because she had not exhausted all domestic remedies. In 2013 after the death of Savita Halappanavar, she came forward, revealed her identity and again asked for this sort of termination to be legal.
Tourancheau and July v. France is a free speech case that was brought to the European Court of Human Rights. Patricia Tourancheau, a journalist, and Serge July, the editor of the French newspaper Libération were prosecuted, convicted and fined 10,000 Francs each for violating a statute of 1881, the Law on the Freedom of the Press of 29 July 1881, which prohibits the publication of any documents concerned with criminal or correctional proceedings prior to their reading in a public audience. Tourancheau and July adamantly claimed that the law, particularly Article 38, was in direct dispute with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Once the case reached the European Court of Human Rights after appealing the French Supreme Court decision, which upheld Tourancheau and July's prosecution, the European Court of Human Rights found that the ruling did not violate Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
