Legalization

This article traces a genealogy of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) and examines the charter's overall implementation. While there has always been a struggle between competing views of how to ensure more or less continental accountability for norms related to democratic governance in Africa, enforcement by the African Union (AU) has definitively become more robust since the ACDEG's adoption. The article argues that this development is observable in three trends: continental legalization, technocratization and judicia-lization of politics. It evaluates the growth of normative commitments in the field of democracy, elections and governance and their increasing consolidation into binding legal treaties; explores the increasing reliance on AU technical assistance in the implementation and interpretation of these instruments; and assesses the expanding role of continental and regional judicial bodies in enforcing commitments to democracy. Building upon a better understanding of these trends, the article identifies key contextual factors that will shape the ACDEG's future implementation.

Our aim is to contribute towards the debate about the processes through which knowledge and meanings regarding the status of human embryos circulate among experts and laymen in Portugal. Expectations and concerns expressed regarding the reliability, quality, safety and efficacy of medical technologies for assisted reproduction were assessed. This study is based on data from individual interviews that sought to explore the complexities, similarities and differences among the views and values of jurists, doctors and couples involved in in vitro fertilization treatments. It consists of a qualitative analysis on a case study. If jurists and doctors frame the status of embryos as categories of a biological, technical and/or legal nature, couples establish between themselves a variety of ontological relationships of a moral, affective and social nature. Through these, they can be represented as ethical beings, thus contrasting with the medical-legal biologization of the embryos.

Background: Physician-assisted suicide is one of the features with very different legal solutions in the world.
In Serbia, physician-assisted suicide is a crime, within a crime of the assisted suicide. The possibility of the legislation
of the voluntary active euthanasia may open the door to the decriminalization of the physician-assisted
suicide.
Methods: Data were obtained from the Clinical Hospital Center in Kragujevac, Republic of Serbia collected
during 2015. The research included 88 physicians: 57 male physicians (representing 64.77% of the sample) and
31 female physicians (35.23% of the sample). Due to the nature, subject, and hypothesis of the research, the
authors used descriptive method and the method of the theoretical content analysis.
Results: We have raised numerous questions. A slight majority of the physicians (58%) believes that physicianassisted
suicide should be legalized, while 42% is for another solution. 90.9% took a viewpoint that it is
completely unacceptable legalization of the physician-assisted suicide for all age groups, while the remaining
9.1% is to such legislative move. From the other side, 40.7% of respondents would prescribe a lethal dose of
the medicament to the patient, who is in the terminal stage of the incurable disease, but, 59.3% would not do it.
Interesting is that 13.8% of the physician had a patient who asked for the information how to commit suicide,
and 12.5% gave them such information.
Conclusion: Physicians in Serbia are divided on this issue. The majority of them are for the legalization of
medical assistance to suicide, but there is a strong division among them on various issues.