The paper deals with the critical questioning of the relation between legitimate imposed legal obligations and the rights to refuse these obligations based on the right of the freedom of conscience, i.e. conscientious objection. The critical perspective that is applied to conduct the questioning is a legal profession because, in Croatian legal culture, there is no articulated answer to the question of how to reconcile these two obligations within the legal profession. The paper draws on the comprehension of John Rawls’s (...) theory of conscientious objection since it is a systematic analysis of justice that shall submit subjective understanding of the good to the principle of right. In practice, the focus is on the grounds for acknowledging conscientious objection among lawyers as well on the obstacles to exercising this right. (shrink)

In the world of rapid general-social development, due to the emergence of questions about new holders of legal rights and the emergence of new forms of legal rights in general, the discussion about moral and legal rights has always been, is and will be an increasingly topical issue. It is not, however, disputed that law per se, in enabling a wide range of legal rights, has always been centred around the issue of human life and health in the first place. (...) The achievement of human welfare is undoubtedly predicated upon good health, and fostered by a unique “mechanism” – the right to health. Although we live in an era of great glorification of the cult and value of health (healthism), the current epoch raises a series of human-health-focused questions and controversies. However, the primary and very crucial question we can ask ourselves is – what would health even be? Precisely because of the great questionability of the above question, the protection of human health and the exercise of the right to health may represent one of the most challenging matters of law itself. The right to health, as a legal and inclusive right, epitomizes not only the rights asserted by human beings as such, but also environmental and nature protection as an inseparable denominator of the status of human health. Although prominent legal/political philosophers and theorists were pessimist about the realisation and enforcement of the right to (the highest attainable standard of) health, this paper elaborates on the possibility of its realisation, which largely depends on the way in which the concept of health is understood. Health should be understood exclusively as an idea-value category to be aspired to, as a should (sollen), by no means as a pure and categorical reflection of reality (sein). Given the inclusiveness specific to the legal right to health, which undoubtedly contains certain problematic elements, this paper aims to grasp and consider the right to health in its conceptual and normative entirety premised upon the following question: how does law protect human health and its constitutive elements? The same question invokes interesting interdisciplinary (legal and philosophical) points of view. (shrink)

Not the least noticeable is the fact that the ancient Greek compound euthanasia, formed by Francis Bacon, has retained its original terminological form since it was first used in the 17th century. Among all other controversial ethical issues, however, the conceptual notion of euthanasia categorically evokes rather important controversies. The questions that arise in this context are whether there is a definition, or at least a determination, of the term euthanasia and whether we are aware of its use in scientific (...) discourse, what exactly is euthanasia. The paper offers a terminological elaboration of the term euthanasia in a linguistic, but mainly legal and medical-procedural context, in order to examine the coherence in defining the term between these categories and, consequently, to determine the key determinants of euthanasia according to categorical sections. The key facts stated are the primary determination or the possible definition of the term for any further scientific study of euthanasia as one of the most controversial issues within bioethical doctrine. (shrink)

One of the fundamental questions of legal philosophy and theory is what it means to have a legal right, i.e. who can be considered a legal right holder. With the parallel development of bioethical doctrine, this question about rights holders is becoming increasingly relevant, raising the question of whether rights holders can be animals, trees, foetuses, future generations or machines (artificial intelligence). This question also applies to the dead, where the difficult question of the end of life and the final (...) occurrence of death also arises. By critically elaborating the positions of contemporary legal theorists in the context of two key theories of rights, the Will Theory and the Interest Theory and their mutual differences, the paper attempts to offer an account of the dead as potential right holders. In this context, the above legal theory elaboration is reflectively considered in the context of civil law doctrine of legal rights, as one of the fundamental areas within the general part of civil law. The legal subjectivity of the deceased is also observed in the field of (post-mortem protection) personality rights, but also in a pragmatic way in relation to recent domestic case law practice, as well as the case law practice of the European Court of Human Rights, where interesting legal issues have arisen that imply the question of the deceased as legal right holders. (shrink)