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Of the various rules establishing a mental health clinician's legal duty to take precautions to protect their patient from harming others, the most common is the specificity rule that limits the protective duty to warn reasonably identifiable victims. The specificity rule is important wherein the main or only specified protective measure is warning the victim. In the last quarter century, Pennsylvania adopted the specificity rule from its Supreme Court Emerich decision. In its recent Maas decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expanded the duty to apply to potential victims who are unnamed and unidentifiable except for living on the same floor as the patient of a multiunit building. Victims constituted a group referenced by the patient as a "neighbor," but from the patient's threats both narrower "next door neighbor" and broader "anyone." We place this judicial expansion of the duty to warn within the context of professional ethics guidelines and state Tarasoff statutes that pertain to psychiatrists. The potential adverse consequences of this vague expansion of the specificity rule for clinicians, psychiatric patients, and unconnected citizens of Pennsylvania and for other jurisdictions in which courts could misguidedly follow this expansionist example are discussed, along with potential solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Host states of transnational corporations are often unwilling and unable to exercise their duty to protect individuals from business-related human rights violations. Attributing an extraterritorial duty to protect to the home states of transnational corporations could realistically contribute towards a more robust system of human rights protections. This paper discusses the permissibility of an extraterritorial duty to protect under public international law and the potential emergence of such an obligation under international human rights law. It relies on the concept of extraterritorial jurisdiction to address both. In view thereof, it also introduces a novel basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction, a so-called cause-and-effect jurisdiction, under which an extraterritorial home state duty to protect is tenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper I analyse the implications of "flattening" the curve for long-term care residents in the Province of Ontario, Canada during the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic. I then question what the role of healthcare systems are in the response to public health emergencies and problematize their status as entities in need of protection. The ethical implications of this are discussed in light of potential challenges raised by climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people find the manipulation of the human germline—editing the DNA of sperm or egg cells such that these genetic changes are passed to the resulting offspring—to be morally impermissible. In this paper, I argue for the claim that editing the human germline is morally permissible. My argument starts with the claim that outcome uncertainty regarding the effects of germline editing shows that the duty to not harm cannot ground the prohibition of germline editing. Instead, if germline editing is wrong, it is wrong because it violates a duty to protect. However, we also have an epistemic duty to gather evidence regarding the effects of editing the human germline which overrides any moral duty to protect future generations. Thus, we have a duty to gather evidence regarding the effects of editing the human germline, which is to say that we have a duty to edit the human germline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1976, the Supreme Court of California issued its well‐known Tarasoff Principle. From this principle, other courts found a duty to warn, and some found more than just a duty to warn, a duty to protect. As courts in other states adopted a version of the Tarasoff Principle, they issued a wide variety of third‐party liability rules. In light of the dynamic, everchanging Tarasoff jurisprudence in the United States and recent relevant appellate court opinion in Missouri, a timely updated summary and update of Tarasoff‐related jurisprudence in Missouri is warranted. In the present analysis, we compiled the four appellate court decisions that pertained to the questions of Tarasoff‐like third‐party liability in the State of Missouri: Sherrill v. Wilson (1983), Matt v. Burrell (1995), Bradley v. Ray (1995), and Virgin v. Hopewell (2001). We reviewed all legal measures for clinicians to protect nonpatients in Missouri, not just those that relate to protecting nonpatients from violence as in a Tarasof‐like scenario. Thus, this paper concisely provides a compendium of such options and allows for a meaningful comparison of which legal, protective measures are mandatory and which are permissive, thereby evoking the question of whether measures of protecting nonpatients from a patient's violent acts ought to be mandatory duties or permissive application of professional judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Korean judicial decision concerns a case in which a child was adopted overseas following from the falsification of registration status and family records. The plaintiff, who was the child in question, sued the Social Welfare Organization B and the Republic of Korea for damages suffered in the international adoption process. The court found in favor of the plaintiff and ordered the Social Welfare Organization B to pay with interest. This case underscores the need for careful evaluation and oversight in international adoption processes to ensure that the best interests of the child are protected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses, if the Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom, that was developed by the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC), can be used to expand the protection of human rights against the harms of climate change. The case of the Swiss Senior Women shows that there are jurisdictions, where the Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom could be applied to improve standing and the control standard of states’ climate change action. Within international law bodies with jurisdiction over human rights treaties there are distinctive standards of protection against the harms of climate change. A major deficit within the international human rights protection against climate change lies within the focus on the positive obligations and the corresponding wide margin of appreciation granted to the states. The Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom could provide a protection expansion in this regard, especially in the case of the European Court of Human Rights. It could also enable and legitimise present human rights concerns focused on the future actions of states following their past inaction. One considerable hurdle that is not addressed by it are procedural hurdles like the Plaumann formula applied by the European Court of Justice. The Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom cannot solve major problems for climate change litigation like procedural hurdles. Yet, it can provide a new approach for complaints to address unambitious mitigation legislation which will lead to future human rights infringements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses, if the Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom, that was developed by the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC), can be used to expand the protection of human rights against the harms of climate change. The case of the Swiss Senior Women shows that there are jurisdictions, where the Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom could be applied to improve standing and the control standard of states’ climate change action. Within international law bodies with jurisdiction over human rights treaties there are distinctive standards of protection against the harms of climate change. A major deficit within the international human rights protection against climate change lies within the focus on the positive obligations and the corresponding wide margin of appreciation granted to the states. The Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom could provide a protection expansion in this regard, especially in the case of the European Court of Human Rights. It could also enable and legitimise present human rights concerns focused on the future actions of states following their past inaction. One considerable hurdle that is not addressed by it are procedural hurdles like the Plaumann formula applied by the European Court of Justice. The Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom cannot solve major problems for climate change litigation like procedural hurdles. Yet, it can provide a new approach for complaints to address unambitious mitigation legislation which will lead to future human rights infringements.

Some people oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses have full moral status and thus a right to not be killed. We argue that special obligations that hold between mother and fetus also hold between parents and their children. We argue that if these special obligations necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then they also necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of organ donation. If we accept the argument that it is obligatory to override a woman's bodily autonomy for the sake of an unborn child's survival, we must continue to override the bodily autonomy of parents to ensure the survival of their living children, until the parent no longer has a special obligation to their child to the same degree as their special obligation to the fetus. And if the life of a child is truly more important than the bodily autonomy of its parents, as must be the case to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, this should remain true until such a time that their children are no longer considered their responsibility. Thus, parity of reasoning suggests that policies compelling the gestation of a fetus should be accompanied by policies compelling organ donation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Tarasoff case of 1976, mental health professionals are recognized to have a "duty to protect" third‐party targets from violence‐threatening patients, but little is known about what happens after clinicians warn law enforcement. In 2000, Huber et al. published a study that surveyed Michigan police about "Tarasoff warnings." We conducted a 20‐year follow‐up study, inviting all Michigan police and sheriff departments to participate. There were no significant differences between studies about knowledge of Tarasoff‐related policies, which was low in both surveys. We found significant decreases in the number of officers who had ever intervened due to warning calls. Of the survey respondents, 83% supported documenting warning calls. For those who received warnings, 96% followed up with at least one intervention. In both studies, notifying other officers was the most common action taken. 56% said they would take action to remove a firearm. We identified opportunities for training law enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report of a 29-year-old female with a history of Schizophrenia and Cannabis Use Disorder who presented with auditory hallucinations that asked her to kill her immediate supervisor. She presented the ethical dilemma many healthcare providers face in balancing the principles of patient confidentiality with the duty to protect and beneficence. The clinicians breached the patient's right to confidentiality to protect her supervisor by informing the supervisor, their manager, and the police. However, they also ensured her job security, which she risked in an environment where mental illness is highly stigmatized. This case highlights the importance of considering the ethical principles of disclosing confidential information, such as the Tarasoff I and II, and beneficence (as her job was protected) in making clinical decisions. It also summarizes the legal precedents established by the Tarasoff cases and the implications for clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece uses the Doce River case (2015) to illustrate the gendered impacts of the failure of corporate human rights due diligence. We also ask the question: would the Gender Dimensions of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights1 (Gender Guidance) have made a difference to the way women were treated in preventive measures taken and in the application of redress mechanisms? Taking this specific case, we seek to illustrate the importance of integrating gender into international business and human rights (BHR) frameworks if women's rights are to be protected and respected in the context of business activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an analysis of State practice and case law, this article examines one basic principle of international law embodied in Article 10 of the International Law Commission's Articles on State responsibility. In the context of an unsuccessful insurrection or civil war, the host State is responsible for its own failure to discharge its due diligence obligation to protect foreign investors in relation to acts committed by rebels, i.e. to make all efforts within its capacity to suppress an insurrection and to take all reasonable measures to prevent injurious conduct by rebels and damages from occurring. This article examines the scope and content of this 'duty to protect' obligation, the applicable 'test' and the relevant circumstances to determine whether any breach of the obligation has been committed in light of recent investment awards analysing the full protection and security clause in the context of Libya's civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just war theorists who argue that war is morally justified under certain circumstances infer implicitly that establishing the military institutions needed to wage war is also morally justified. In this paper, I mount a case in favor of a standing military establishment: to the extent that going to war is a way to discharge duties to protect fellow citizens and distant strangers from grievous harms, we have a duty to set up the institutions that enable us to discharge that duty. I then respond to four objections drawn from Ned Dobos's recent book Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how ubuntu relational philosophy may be used to ground beneficial coercive care without necessarily violating a patient's dignity. Specifically, it argues that ubuntu philosophy is a useful theory for developing necessary conditions for determining a patient's potential dangerousness; setting reasonable limits to the duty to protect; balancing the long-term good of providing unimpeded therapy for patients who need it with the short-term good of protecting at-risk parties; and advancing a framework for future case law and appropriate regulations in the care of psychotherapy patients. Issues regarding the decision to breach medical confidentiality in psychotherapeutic care are ultimately reserved for the courts. Professional assessment might be an important first step in this process, and court rulings govern most aspects of this assessment. However, current case law, especially in the United States, places an unreasonable expectation on psychotherapists to protect all at-risk parties or foresee that a patient intends to follow through on said threats. It has largely failed to guarantee psychotherapy patients unlimited access to care, while potentially inhibiting future honest communication between patients and health professionals and endangering the safety of others. Of these decisions, the two most prominent are the 1976 Tarasoff decision and the 2016 Volk decision. This paper argues for the possibility of grounding good laws in ubuntu African philosophy in a way that protects others from harm and ensures unimpeded access to care without necessarily breaching medical confidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bullying among peers prevents children from enjoying their human rights in schools without the threat of aggression, harassment and discrimination. However, the States' duty to protect children from bullying remains loudly unexplored both in academia and in human rights practice. This article begins to fill a gap by articulating the States' duty to protect children from physical, psychological or relational aggression caused by other children in an educational setting beyond a punitive or individualistic perspective. This is the first study to operationalise the States' duty to protect children from bullying by examining the reliability of reporting mechanisms, the accuracy and disaggregation of data, and the quality of training for education professionals and future teachers in a country, in this case, Spain. The analysis relies on rigorous empirical research with focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 139 people in three Spanish regions, including parents, children, academics, bullying survivors and education professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is evident that the ECtHR's main task is applying the ECHR, it is debatable whether the Court has adequate regard to general international law when considering questions left open by the ECHR. We contribute to this debate from a normative perspective. We discuss the criticism that the Court unduly evades the ARSIWA by applying an expansive positive obligations doctrine. We submit that the Court's propensity to focus on preventive obligations is justified in substance, since it is difficult to imagine how human rights could be effectively protected without such positive obligations in a world where state, third state and private actors mingle. In this sense, the Court's jurisprudence makes valuable contributions to the adaptation of the international legal system to changing societies. Criticism should focus less on the Court's inclination toward positive obligations than on its pertinent methodology, which is at times less than convincing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated interventions programs (AIPs) offer clients potential benefits in relation to the accessibility, flexibility, and effectiveness of particular types of clinical services. Although social workers have various obligations to report, warn, or protect others from harm for in-person clinical services, relevant laws and ethical standards do not provide social workers with clear guidance on whether these obligations apply when social workers engage clients through AIPs. This article explores how social workers can balance concerns about client confidentiality, safety, and reporting obligations when using AIPs as part of their work with clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the first German climate case filed against the Federal Government in the Berlin Administrative Court in 2018 and decided in October 2019. The article identifies and examines the key elements of the decision of the Berlin Court and it places the legal issues of the case within the relevant framework of German administrative court procedure law, administrative law and constitutional law. The case evolved around the legally binding force of a cabinet decision of the Federal Government which laid down the German greenhouse gas emissons reduction target for 2020. Despite the fact that the application was dismissed for lack of standing, some important legal developments can be derived from the judgment, especially in relation to justiciability of the case and the state's duty to protect fundamental rights under the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) in the climate change context. Just after the judgment was delivered, the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) adopted the first Federal Climate Protection Act in November 2019 and thus defined the state's new climate targets in statutory form. This changed the legal landscape and claimants consequently abstained from appealing the judgment. However, the German Constitutional Court now has the opportunity to clarify further some of the legal issues that arose in this first German climate case from applying 'traditional' legal concepts to the challenge of climate change, if it decides to hear the constitutional complaint which was filed in 2020 against the Federal Climate Protection Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2016 1(3), 2499-8249 | Editorial | (Abstract) The flawed EU's attempts to enforce the rule of law, both in Hungary and Poland, dramatically underline the EU institutions' weakness. How can legal academics provide the EU with new tools to tackle these violations of the rule of law? Not only in better equipping the EU with tools to impose EU law or sanctioning recalcitrant member States. Legal academics could start from populist discourses themselves. In particular, two critiques of the EU's action must be dealt with. The first one is the absence of predictability and clarity of the EU's action. The second one is the source of EU's action: "in the name of whom" is the EU sanctioning is the question that must urgently be answered to.

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2016 1(2), 621-635 | European Forum Insight of 22 August 2016 | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - II. The foundation of NAPs roadmap: the 2011 United Nations guiding principles on business and human rights and the 'protect, respect and remedy' framework. - III. NAPs roadmap and the 2016 UK NAP Update. - IV. NAPs and the polycentric notion of corporate human rights due diligence. - V. NAPs and the extraterritorial applicability of corporate policies on human rights and of corporate human rights due diligence. - VI. NAPs and the State-business nexus. - VII. Conclusions. | (Abstract) With the recent Update of its 2013 National Action Plan (NAP) the UK Government has given account of the process of implementation of the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs). In particular, the UK Government has listed the achievements made and the actions taken over the past two years in this regard. This Insight analyses the basic elements of the Up-date, their relationships with the Guiding Principles and the other NAPs. It also focuses on some specific issues raised by the 2016 Update analysis: the polycentric notion of corporate human rights due diligence; the debate over the extraterritorial application of corporate human rights due diligence and of corporate policies on human rights; the role of State-business nexus and the possible hierarchy amongst the three Pillars of the GPs.

Although migration is a transnational phenomenon involving a plurality of states, the state of departure is often unwilling/unable to offer protection. Receiving/transit states can refrain from engaging with the problem until migrants have already entered their territory. With high seas, this can result in the deaths of people taking the risk of travelling to a new place. The article argues that states have a duty to offer (some) protection even when migrants are not in their territory, based on human rights' positive effect and the principle of due diligence. Because of the transnational nature of migration, all involved states have the responsibility to offer protection. This may lead to concurrent state liability for failure to protect. The duty to protect may extend to the high seas, even when the traditional links for the establishment of jurisdiction are absent. The duty is not unlimited, it needs to prevail over other considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictability of dangerousness in association with mental disorders remains elusive, outside of a few relatively well-established risk factors for the prognostication of violence, such as male sex, the presence of a psychotic disorder, and comorbid substance abuse. In clinical practice, inquiry into the presence of aggressive or violent ideation, in the form of ideas of homicide or suicide, is part of a standard mental status examination. Nonetheless, fantasy life, when it concerns harm toward others, may not be as reliable an indicator of imminent danger as it may be in the case of self-harm. Five cases of young Italian men with Asperger syndrome and recurrent and extremely violent femicide fantasies are presented. While there is no direct correlation between autism spectrum conditions and violence, as other humans, persons with an autistic condition are capable of committing crimes, including homicide. All five had in common a number of characteristics and behaviors felt to be pathoplastic: All had been bullied, all had been romantically rejected, all were long-standing First Person Shooter (FPS) game players, and all were avid violent pornography consumers. The potential for an actual neurocognitive impact of violent video games, well documented in the literature, and its combination with personal life history and chronic habituation following long-standing violent pornography use is discussed in the context of social and emotional vulnerabilities. While aggressive fantasies cannot and should not be underestimated, in countries where duty to protect legislation does not exist, a clinical approach is imperative, as, incidentally, should be anywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]