Leo van Doesburg

At the end of 2018, ECPM Member and Senator Rónán Mullen 's report in the Council of Europe on Providing Palliative Care has been adopted the end of last year. This report affirms that Palliative Care is fundamental to human dignity and a component of the human right to health. Palliative care aims at the quality of life of both patients and their families. The Council of Europe asks the Member States to recognize palliative care as a human right and fully integrate it into their health-care system and to dedicate the necessary resources to it.  The Assembly deeply regrets that on the organisation of palliative care, hundreds of thousands of people in Europe still do not have access to appropriate palliative care services and is concerned about the lack of access to appropriate pain relief leading to situations in which patients suffer for months and even years and experience avoidable painful deaths.  Furthermore, the Governments should remove all obstacles that restr...

On the 28th of May, the European Commission has to give an answer to the European Citizens Initiative "One of Us". Nearly 1.9 million signatures were collected to ask the European Union could stop funding the embryonic stem cell research and abortion in developing countries The left-liberal opposition against the "One of Us" was fierce and many arguments were used to neutralize the concern of so many European citizens. Main arguments were: One of Us is piloted by ultra-conservative, religious, anti-choice organisations One of Us is actually not a Citizens’ initiative but orchestrated by the Catholic Church and the East Orthodox churches One of Us” is the latest in the series of recent attacks on gender equality, women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights in Europe“One of Us” is  imposing their religious beliefs at any cost One of Us will be responsible of the death of thousands of women in developing countries One of Us wants to ...

Hearing about the European Citizens Initiative “One of Us” in the European Parliament was a success Human Dignity and the protection of life are not political values but are inviolable and must be respected. “The issue is a simple and logical one: human life exists from conception and therefore should be respected. The European Court of Justice also defined that human embryo starts at conception.  The European Commission should be more consistent with this fact ”explained Gregor Puppink Director of the European Center for Law and Justice and leader of the European Citizens Initiative “One of Us” at the hearing which took place in the European Parliament last Thursday, 10 April. The hearing in the European Parliament had as main target to create a dialogue between the representatives of the Citizens Initiative that collected almost 2 million signatures and the Members of the European Parliament under the supervision of the European Commission that will give an answer on the ...