[Spain] A judge argues that medical staff should “sacrifice their right to life” for the benefit of the rest in the pandemic

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  1. >A judge argues that medical staff should “sacrifice their right to life” for the benefit of the rest in the pandemic

    >The controversial sentence of a court in Jaén dismisses the demand of the nurses who demanded more protection measures from the Board during the first wave of covid-19

    >The Jaen judge José Antonio Lucini considers that “the nurses had the obligation to sacrifice their right to life and integrity, even without masks, for the benefit of the life and integrity of the rest of the population.” This has been stated in the ruling in which he dismisses the lawsuit for violation of fundamental rights that the nurses of the Andalusian province filed during the first wave of the pandemic against the Board due to the shortage of protective equipment . The College of Nursing of Jaén has appealed the ruling before the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia, as reported yesterday by the body. “They want to turn us into martyrs,” criticized its president, José Francisco Lendínez.

    >The sentence recognizes the shortage of protective equipment for nurses during the first months of the pandemic. But it does not condemn the Administration when it understands that the lack of said material was “irremediable.” The ruling considers that in the situation of having to choose between the life of citizens or working in dangerous conditions for nurses, the right to life of the population must be privileged.

    >The text compares the case with others such as the Grapo terrorists on hunger strike or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, “something that is not at all comparable,” says the College of Nursing. The judge’s ruling reads: “Regarding the sentence on the hunger strike of the Grapo prisoners, the Constitutional Court had to face the issue of availability over life itself. In it, the two rights contemplated in article 15 of the Constitution face each other: on the one hand, the right to life and, on the other, the right to physical and moral integrity, in its dimension of exclusion of any external intervention without consent in the body. or spirit of a person.

    >The lawyer for the nurses, Santiago López Poyatos, considers the example argued by the court to be “unfortunate”. And he explains: “In these cases, several concurrent fundamental rights were weighed in the same person or subject, such as the right to be forcefully fed and against the will of a prisoner to avoid his death, or to give a blood transfusion to a Witness of Jehovah against his religion to save his life and, therefore, it would be chosen to protect the life of the person above any other fundamental right that would correspond to that same person.

    >However, this sentence, according to the lawyer, considers that during the pandemic “rights that concur in different people or subjects can be sacrificed; that is, that some are sacrificed, without providing them with the means, to save others, as occurred in ancient societies such as Egypt, or in pre-Columbian times”. And he adds: “This sacrifice would not be required in a modern society except in the event of a declaration of war, and not with a simple state of alarm, which has even been partially declared unconstitutional.”

    >This same week the sentence has been made public by which the Valencian Community Health Council must compensate between 5,000 and 49,180 euros to medical professionals from Alicante who worked during the first wave of the pandemic in the province, for doing so without the appropriate protective equipment. In the ruling, the judge considers that “health professionals have the right to be compensated for personal and moral damages.” In the province of Jaén, 3 out of 10 health workers were infected in the first wave of covid, mostly nurses, and one of them died.

    >“With this sentence, the right of any worker to have the adequate means of protection to preserve their health is obviated: they want to turn us into martyrs so that the Administration does not have to answer for putting us in the front line without means, nor for the nurses infected and even deceased. If this is the concept they have of us, we will have to ask the Government for pension medals, for the heroism of our nurses, who have replaced the Government’s action”, argues Lendínez.

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