Informed Consent, Self-Determination and Rights to Freedom in Jurisprudence

In recent decades informed consent has become simply the expression of the fundamental rights of individuals despite the fact that some signs of its ambiguous nature still remain. This means that the idea of informed consent is very much influenced by external values, by the specific cultural context or by the laws in force in a certain historical period. The great amount of national and international legal references lead us to believe that, in this matter, there is a common constitutional sense, whose conceptual core is shared by the whole society and which consists of fundamental rights to self determination and to health as defined thanks to recent medical and scientific innovations. In this contribution, we shall address issues relating to individual liberty rights, examine a number of Italian and European judicial decisions concerning the right to life and self determination and consider the relationship between civil and criminal principles in matters of self determination in the light of constitutional principles deriving from the conclusion that the concept of individual from a legal perspective differs from the concept of individual from a biological perspective and that the biological boundary itself of any individual may be modified in several personal ways.

Keywords: Informed consent, constitutional rights, self determination, health, individual, biological boundary

Amedeo Santosuosso, Valentina Sellaroli, Informed Consent, Self-Determination and Rights to Freedom in Jurisprudence in "SALUTE E SOCIETÀ" 3EN/2012, pp 154-178, DOI: 10.3280/SES2012-003010EN