Spain has been ordered to pay a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses €26,000 in compensation for the medical and judicial decisions that led to the blood transfusion that saved her life in an operating room at Madrid Hospital in La Paz. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg found that the duty judge who authorised the treatment, which the woman had explicitly refused due to her religious beliefs, did so without adequate information and without the courts properly examining her allegations. The sentence includes that her right to privacy was violated in relation to her religious freedom and imposes compensation of €12,000 and an additional €14,000 for legal costs.
The member of Jehovah’s Witnesses who brought her case to Strasbourg lived in Soria and went to the Santa Bárbara public hospital in the summer of 2017, where she was diagnosed with uterine fibroids. Her condition deteriorated for a year until the hospital decided to transfer her case to La Paz, Madrid, after she recorded hemorrhages and several emergency room admissions. Throughout those months, the woman wrote that due to her religious beliefs as a Witness, she refused to receive a blood transfusion. According to this belief, the Old and New Testaments command “to abstain from blood out of respect for God.”
While the woman was being transferred to Madrid, the surgeons in La Paz contacted the judge on duty in the Plaza de Castilla to see if they could operate on the woman with a blood transfusion. The magistrate’s response was affirmative and the operation was successful, saving her life. The Witness’s legal battle then began so that justice would recognize that the blood transfusion had been “like rape, something disgusting”, that the doctors’ attitude had been “paternalistic” and that the judge on duty had given the witness “carte blanche”. doctors.
The Spanish courts, from the Tribunal to the Constitutional Court, have rejected all his appeals, but it is now the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that has established that the chain of decisions violated his right to privacy in relation to his right to religious freedom. The judgment does not call into question Spanish regulations on patient protection or the fact that the objective of the doctors in Santa Bárbara and La Paz was to save his life, but he understands that his express refusal to receive blood transfusions was not sufficiently respected.
Strasbourg focuses on a key point in the process: when the doctors in La Paz contacted the judge to obtain authorization. Until then, Strasbourg says, the woman had clearly expressed her refusal in writing, but the judge authorized the treatment, claiming that it had only been verbal. The information provided to the Madrid court, Strasbourg complains, was “incorrect and incomplete” and was not subsequently corrected when her allegations were rejected by the Provincial Court and the Constitutional Court. The result is that the Spanish state must compensate the woman €12,000 for damages and an additional €14,000 for legal costs.
“We can only confirm that the applicant’s life was saved that day,” Strasbourg said. He survived thanks to a “medical intervention” that health workers said was “necessary” to save his life. During the court proceedings, the woman was asked whether she would have been prepared to die if she had not received the blood transfusion and her legal representative replied that “she wanted to live and still wants to live.”
