Update: Conveniently on the day the Duchess gives birth to her third child, the UK hospital decides to pull the plug on Alfie. Reports say he will not be given oxygen and doctors said he’d only make it a few minutes off life support. Now he’s made it many hours. The POPE and Italy have granted him citizenship and are trying to get him there to help. But it appears the UK hospital will euthanize him with Fentanyl (used for prisoner executions) and kill him sometime today. 🙁
Tom Evans and Kate James, the parents of sweet, 23-month-old Alfie Evans will not be allowed to present their case before the European Court of Human Rights after judges in the UK refused to intervene on their son’s behalf. The parents had hoped to overturn the judges ruling that doctors at Liverpool’s Alder Hey hospital could stop providing life-support treatment, against his their wishes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt6FFtNcknY
Alfie’s parents originally wanted to move their son from Alder Hey to a hospital in Rome where Italian doctors were willing to treat him (there was an air ambulance available to help). However, the judge, Mr. Justice Hayden said flying Alfie to a foreign hospital “would be wrong and pointless”1 (this is how we refer to human life around the world now) and a Court of Appeal judges upheld his decisions. Justices at Britain’s Supreme Court and ECHR judges also refused to intervene.
“Specialists at Alder Hey said life support treatment should stop and Mr Justice Hayden said he accepted medical evidence which showed that further treatment was futile.”2
And so, the couple changed their argument to a habeas corpus application, claiming that Alfie was being wrongly “detained” at Alder Hey. (Habeas Corpus, Latin for “you may have the body,” is a legal maneuver which requires a court to examine the legality of a detention.) However, according to The European Court of Human Rights, the family’s application for help was inadmissible.
We are so sorry and heartbroken and sad for this family.
