Country Report England

Abstract

People terminally ill are at their most vulnerable. Whether conscious or unconscious, they are dependant on health practitioners and others, e.g. relatives or friends. The issue of the autonomy of the person, by no means settled in relation to fully competent and healthy individuals, in the case of terminally ill patients becomes acute. Civil law works mainly with a concept of an average person, of average competences and faculties and average values, needs and desires. Such ideal persons are the core of Law’s anthropological model, and the entire range of regulation by the Civil law of personal and other matters (Law of Persons, Obligations, Succession, Property and so on) is designed on the basis of this model. Persons that veer significantly from the model, from Jehovah’s witnesses to children, to mentally retarded or handicapped, or people unconscious or in a vegetative state, are still, at the dawn of the third millennium, handled with unease and suspicion by our Civil laws.