This is the best summary I could come up with:
The court found that while the legislation, which prevented the applicant from accessing an abortion after her foetus was diagnosed with trisomy 21 (Down’s syndrome), did not legally amount to “inhuman or degrading treatment”, it did violate her right to privacy and family life, protected under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
However, a ruling of Poland’s constitutional tribunal – which criminalised abortions carried out on “eugenic grounds”, that is due to foetal abnormalities – came into effect just one day before her procedure.
ML’s doctor informed her that due to the new legislation her abortion appointment was cancelled and that she would not be able to access the procedure at any Polish hospital.
“In her rapidly deteriorating mental state, ML had to organise a trip abroad within a few days, leaving her family and loved ones in Poland,” her lawyers said.
Donald Tusk became Poland’s prime minister this week, almost two months after a parliamentary election handed a majority to an alliance of opposition parties.
His appointment puts an end to eight years of rule by the nationalist, populist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Making abortion illegal is contrary to the right to privacy and family life?
Great result for polish women, but this is not a real right to abortion, but a court twisting the law in an astonishingly blatant way.The right to privacy is mostly discussed as the right to live your life without being spied upon by corporations or the government, but it actually goes further: it is the right to make “design decisions” about the most private aspects of your life without the government being able to interfere. The court decided that the law banning abortion impacted some of these most private aspects.
Non-interference is a prerequisite for privacy, but here it does not require omission but rather that a person wanted the state to perform an action through third parties. I know that balancing rights is always difficult and never leaves everyone satisfied, but such an extreme interpretation is even dangerous, it is almost an absolute shield capable of invalidating much of the law; btw, it would be fun to see the brazen court uphold controversial laws like those against prostitution or hard drugs.
But there remains the original problem, that anti-abortion law exists because they consider the fetus to be another third party, that’s a fundamental issue here and from the news I’ve seen the court seems to have ignored it.
If someone wants to establish abortion as a european right I am fine with that, but it is something that must be done through legislative processes, it is not the competence of a court on its own and even less so in a veiled and botched way.
Unfortunately the conservative wing of PO, entire PSL and most MPs from P50 will still vote against. What can you do
