The UK Dangerous Dogs Act: Improved, but legally and ethically flawed.

BACKGROUND: The Dangerous Dogs Act (DDA) is considered among the most controversial pieces of legislation ever passed in the UK. Its effectiveness and how it works in practice, up until a dog and its owner are charged, has been subjected to considerable analysis. However, there has been little examination of how the DDA works after charging, nor of how courts are interpreting it. METHOD: We accessed legal cases from 1992 to 2019, the period in which the DDA has been in force. Each case was examined from a legal and ethical perspective, using doctrinal legal methodology and the principlism approach to ethics described by Beauchamp and Childress. RESULTS: Analysis showed that while improvements to the function of the act have been made, substantial legal and ethical failings remain, particularly with Section 1 and the therein breed specific legislation (BSL). CONCLUSION: Legal failings could be partially resolved by removing the reversed burden of proof placed on dog owners and allowing a change of ownership for banned breeds. However, ethical failings could only be resolved through the abolition of BSL. Further study into whether judicial bias exists against certain breeds found to be dangerously out of control is warranted.

(Public) Health and Human Rights in Practice.

Public health's reliance on law to define and carry out public activities makes it impossible to define a set of ethical principles unique to public health. Public health ethics must be encompassed within--and consistent with--a broader set of principles that define the power and limits of governmental institutions. These include human rights, health law, and even medical ethics. The human right to health requires governments not only to respect individual human rights and personal freedoms, but also, importantly, to protect people from harm from external sources and third parties, and to fulfill the health needs of the population. Even if human rights are the natural language for public health, not all public health professionals are comfortable with the language of human rights. Some argue that individual human rights--such as autonomy and privacy--unfairly limit the permissible means to achieve the goal of health protection. We argue that public health should welcome and promote the human rights framework. In almost every instance, this will make public health more effective in the long run, because the goals of public health and human rights are the same: to promote human flourishing.

Business oriented EU human cell and tissue product legislation will adversely impact Member States' health care systems.

The transplantation of conventional human cell and tissue grafts, such as heart valve replacements and skin for severely burnt patients, has saved many lives over the last decades. The late eighties saw the emergence of tissue engineering with the focus on the development of biological substitutes that restore or improve tissue function. In the nineties, at the height of the tissue engineering hype, industry incited policymakers to create a European regulatory environment, which would facilitate the emergence of a strong single market for tissue engineered products and their starting materials (human cells and tissues). In this paper we analyze the elaboration process of this new European Union (EU) human cell and tissue product regulatory regime-i.e. the EU Cell and Tissue Directives (EUCTDs) and the Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) Regulation and evaluate its impact on Member States' health care systems. We demonstrate that the successful lobbying on key areas of regulatory and policy processes by industry, in congruence with Europe's risk aversion and urge to promote growth and jobs, led to excessively business oriented legislation. Expensive industry oriented requirements were introduced and contentious social and ethical issues were excluded. We found indications that this new EU safety and health legislation will adversely impact Member States' health care systems; since 30 December 2012 (the end of the ATMP transitional period) there is a clear threat to the sustainability of some lifesaving and established ATMPs that were provided by public health institutions and small and medium-sized enterprises under the frame of the EUCTDs. In the light of the current economic crisis it is not clear how social security systems will cope with the inflation of costs associated with this new regulatory regime and how priorities will be set with regard to reimbursement decisions. We argue that the ATMP Regulation should urgently be revised to focus on delivering affordable therapies to all who are in need of them and this without necessarily going to the market. The most rapid and elegant way to achieve this would be for the European Commission to publish an interpretative document on "placing on the market of ATMPs," which keeps tailor-made and niche ATMPs outside of the scope of the medicinal product regulation.

Some ethical tradeoffs in mental health legislation and practice.

An examination of the intersection of legal and medical discourses, particularly in the realm of mental health legislation, provides a rich opportunity to clarify fundamental ethical conflicts. This essay studies one such legal discourse, the draft amendments to the Mental Health Act (1987), to demonstrate that the realm of ethical decision-making is constrained not only by pragmatic administrative, training and financial issues but also by the very contradictions that are necessarily at the heart of any ethically conducted project, however well intentioned and reasoned.

How to kill gamete donation: retrospective legislation and donor anonymity.

Victoria (Australia) is considering retrospective legislation on the abolition of gamete donor anonymity. Retrospective legislation evokes many negative emotions mainly because it is considered unfair. It also makes it impossible for citizens to organize their life with reasonable certainty of the consequences. Introduction of this law for donor anonymity is defended by the right of the child to know its genetic origins. Against this law, people appeal to the right to privacy and confidentiality of the donor. This paper analyses the arguments for and against a retrospective law on donor anonymity by looking at the conditions that should be respected when two principles (the donor's right to privacy and the child's right to genetic information) have to be balanced. It is concluded that the justification for introducing retrospective law is lacking: the conditions are not fulfilled. Moreover, retroactive laws in the context of gamete donation may jeopardize the whole practice by destroying the trust of candidate donors and recipients in the government.

Bioethics and law: from the abundance of sources to the confusion of genders.

The law of bioethics reveals frequent confusion in the definition and role devolved to the law and ethics. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some of these confusions.

Research exceptionalism.

Research involving human subjects is much more stringently regulated than many other nonresearch activities that appear to be at least as risky. A number of prominent figures now argue that research is overregulated. We argue that the reasons typically offered to justify the present system of research regulation fail to show that research should be subject to more stringent regulation than other equally risky activities. However, there are three often overlooked reasons for thinking that research should be treated as a special case. First, research typically involves the imposition of risk on people who do not benefit from this risk imposition. Second, research depends on public trust. Third, the complexity of the moral decision making required favors ethics committees as a regulative solution for research.