Ivo Telec

Freedom to Choose One’s Own Health Care

Summary Taking care of one’s own health belongs to the diversity of the culture and religion. This concerns not only the conventional medical services on the market but also the traditional medicine. When selecting one‘s own health care, a significant role is played not only by one‘s personal experience but also by one‘s worldview or religious beliefs. The methods of health care differ in the degree of reliability of evidence. Various forms of evidence are established by the law of medicinal drugs. Certain restrictions on health care concern livestock in organic farming. In these cases, the law system favors the homeopathic products before the allopathic ones. Freedom to choose one‘s own health care also concerns natural healing. The Czech law recognizes its practitioners as experts in the private law sense being obliged to act with due care of experts. Natural healing is sometimes associated with religious beliefs. In the Czech Republic there is a constitutional ban on being bound by an exclusive ideology or religion. From the perspective of human rights and biomedicine there is preference of the interests and welfare of human beings to the interests of society or science.

Political Freedom and Intellectual Property Rights: Conflict ofValues

Abstract The paper critically observes the current legal and political happenings around the international multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), including criticism for its rejection by the European Parliament in the year of 2012. This example is treated in the sense of the collision of values in today’s information society, e.g. political freedom on the one hand, and intellectual property rights on the other. The collision of values is balanced fairly by the laws, for example by the statutory licenses and compulsory licenses, too. This text also critically considers some aspects of the contemporary political ideology of information. The author considers the majority of the European public reaction to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement as fearful, irrational and populist by politicians. “Electronic Violence” remains violence like any other and everyone must have the courage to face it. The information society itself is based on the same values as any other human society. Likewise, the information society is prone to various vices, such as greed for foreign assets without any compensation. This greed is only masked by political rhetoric about freedom and human rights. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between legal ideology of information from legally regulated economic shifts.