Dangerous’ new rules designed to expand organ-donor pool likely violate the Charter: legal expert - Canada

National Post | Tom Blackwell


Keith Bedford / Reuters files“The recent government issuance of significant, dangerous, under-the-radar changes in guidelines for brain death determination in Canada is virtually unknown and warrants greater public attention,” said Jacqueline Shaw.

Months into the latest national campaign to recruit desperately needed organ donors, a legal scholar is arguing that new guidelines for declaring people brain dead and eligible for organ harvesting likely violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The non-binding rules developed by a government-appointed expert panel in 2004 — designed to expand the pool of transplant donors — make it more likely that people are being declared dead when they are still alive, and were drafted with no public input, complains Jacqueline Shaw in the McGill Journal of Law and Health.

Given that the panel’s “inappropriately one-sided” guidelines emerged from a government transplant initiative, they are subject to the Charter, and appear to violate the right to life, liberty and security of the person, she argues.

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