Canada is delaying plans which would have allowed people suffering only from mental illness to access medically assisted suicide.

Legislation was due to take effect in March 2023, but now Justice Minister David Lametti  has said the government would seek to delay the expansion of so-called ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ (Maid), following criticism from psychiatrists and physicians across the country, including some who headed up Maid teams in hospitals.

When Canada first passed laws allowing assisted suicide in 2016, only patients with a terminal illness were eligible for the procedure. But in 2019, a Quebec judge found the rule unconstitutional, pushing lawmakers to amend the existing laws to include adults who didn’t have a reasonably foreseeable death. The judge said the law was discriminatory because it didn’t allow for ‘Maid’ in cases of ‘unbearable suffering’ where a person was not terminally ill.

Bill C-7, which passed in March 2021, reflected the court decision, but lawmakers implemented a two-year ban on patients with mental illness as the sole cause of accessing assisted death, giving them more time to study the issue. That study would have ended 17 March.

In recent weeks, psychiatrists have spoken out about a lack of preparedness within the healthcare system. The Association of Chairs of Psychiatry in Canada, which includes heads of psychiatry departments at all 17 medical schools, issued a statement last week calling for a delay.

Media reports have also highlighted controversial cases, increasingly polarizing the issue.

Italian MEP Carlo Fidanza has called attention to the persecution of religious minorities internationally through the criminalisation of “blasphemy” in countries such as Nigeria.

The politician highlighted the case of a Sufi-musician, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, who was sentenced to death by hanging in August 2020 for posting song lyrics to WhatsApp that were deemed blasphemous.

Yahaya’s case has been appealed to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, challenging the constitutionality of the Sharia-based blasphemy laws.

Speaking at the European Parliament, Fidanza noted that there are seven countries in the world where a person can be sentenced to death for blasphemy, including Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria.

The MEP called for blasphemy law in Nigeria to be overturned, calling them “contrary to the human rights of religious minorities, international law and Nigeria’s commitments to its treaties.”

Fidanza continued: “this would be an important signal internally, against the Islamist militias that are bloodying the country, and internationally, towards all states that use anti-blasphemy laws to target religious minorities.”

Domestic surrogacy will also be green-lit, though the Government denies that it is recognising commercial surrogacy at home. However, it will allow surrogate mothers to receive ‘reasonable expenses’ and this can amount to commercial surrogacy in practice because of the size of the payments involved.

In Europe, only Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine allow commercial surrogacy contracts.

Minister Donnelly said: “The policy and draft outline legislative proposals approved by Government today have the potential to provide hundreds of Irish families with a route to formal recognition by the State of the surrogacy arrangements they have undertaken, or will undertake, in other jurisdictions.”

He said they had endeavoured to implement – in so far as possible and appropriate – the proposals of the Special Joint Oireachtas Committee on International Surrogacy and have accepted the majority of the committee’s recommendations.

Jailed teacher Enoch Burke will remain behind bars for the Christmas season after he again refused to obey a court order to stay away and not try to teach at the secondary school at which he is employed,

Despite refusing to purge his contempt Mr Burke, via a video link from Mountjoy, pleaded with Mr Justice Conor Dignam this week to release him from custody. There are examples of judges releasing prisoners from jail despite their contempt not being purged.

He told the court that he was “not a thief, a murderer or a drug dealer” and was behind bars because of his religious objections to “transgenderism”.

The judge said that he was not prepared to release Mr Burke, given that the teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in Co Westmeath is not prepared to purge his contempt and comply with what the judge said is “a valid court order”.

Members of the Romanian Community are celebrating their first Christmas in their newly built church in Co Dublin.

The Betania evangelical Christian community of around 1,200 members, was established in Ireland over ten years ago by a small Romanian community, but is open to all nationalities.

As more Romanians arrived in Ireland, the church continued to grow.

In 2015, it purchased a piece of land from Fingal County Council and two years later planning permission was granted for construction.

When the architects and engineers on the design team asked what the budget for the project was, they were told that there was no budget, that the church would “build by faith”.

When the banks told those leading the project that they would not be able to fund the construction, the pastors turned to their own people.

“The whole church came together, and every family or member said, I can give a thousand or I can give five thousand towards the project, and we basically put all the money together,” according to Pastor Avram Hadarau.

That result has been described as “breathtaking”.

The sanctuary is a theatre with seating for 1,200 people, with top of the range acoustics and a high-definition video wall that spans the length of the interior.

It is quite the leap from the first service that was held in an empty field back in June 2018.

A Dutch court has ruled against activists who wanted to make it legal for anyone to perform assisted suicide procedures in the Netherlands.

In their written decision, the judges ruled that the Dutch law strikes a “fair balance between the societal interests of a ban on assisting a suicide – protection of life and preventing abuse of vulnerable persons – and the interests of an individual to have access to physician-assisted suicide in the case of unbearable suffering without the prospect it will get better”.

The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalise euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide under strict conditions and when overseen by medical professionals in 2002.

Right-to-die organisation Cooperative Last Will brought the case with the aim of widening existing laws. It argued the ban on assisting suicide not overseen by medical professionals violated the right to self-determination and respect for private life enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

In testimony to a U.S. congressional human rights commission, two prominent human rights experts decried the ongoing repression of the Catholic Church by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and urged additional action by the U.S. to oppose Ortega’s regime.

Ortega’s government has in recent years detained, imprisoned, and likely tortured numerous Catholic leaders, including at least one bishop and several priests. His government has also taken action to repress Catholic radio and television stations, and driven Catholic religious orders, including the Missionaries of Charity, from the country. The regime also expelled Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, the former apostolic nuncio in Nicaragua, from the country, a move the Vatican called “incomprehensible.”

“Every kind of religion is suffering the repression of this regime,” Bianca Jagger, a Catholic human rights activist, testified to the committee, but in particular, she said, Ortega is seeking to “destroy the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.”

Jagger is a former actress and ex-wife of Mick Jagger. She is also Nicaraguan and said she knows personally many of the Catholics who have been detained in the country.

At least 270 places of worship, spiritual educational institutions, and sacred sites were either destroyed or damaged by Russian troops, between February 24 and July 15, 2022.

That’s according to a report just published by the Institute for Religious Freedom (IRF), a human rights NGO, founded in 2001 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

While Russian attacks on religious entities in Ukraine have been occurring since 2014, the report says they have become more common and harsher this year.

“If previously priests on the occupied territories only received death threats, now religious leaders are tortured and killed – again, but on a scale far worse than in 2014. If previously Russian occupational authorities expelled Ukrainian believers from their churches and prayer houses, now Russia is destroying the spiritual heritage of Ukraine with missile attacks, shelling, and looting of religious buildings without justification by military necessity.”

The report suggests that “Russian media and religious leaders, such as Patriarch Kirill (…), are justifying the war against Ukraine with propaganda about the supposed protection of Orthodox believers of the Moscow Patriarchate and Russian speakers.” Furthermore, as reported in a new expert legal analysis, “Religious authorities [in Russia] have reinforced the narrative praising the invasion with innuendo and [imbuing it with] spiritual meaning”.

Hospitals are no place for protest, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said, following comments by Archbishop Eamon Martin against banning pro-life gatherings, including prayer, outside hospitals and GP clinics administering abortion.

Archbishop Martin had said that abortion exclusion zones “would be tantamount to enforcing a ban on pro-life activity including prayer and respectful witness” and would further “silence” the voice of unborn children.

The Taoiseach was responding to a question from People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy who described the gatherings, without evidence, as “intimidatory, misogynistic protests”.

Mr Martin said the last thing people going to hospitals need to see “is someone protesting, any agitation or anything to do with that. It just runs counter to what hospitals should be all about.”

Separately, in response to a question from Aontu leader, Peadar Toibin, the Taoiseach said he had a “fair point” in asking, in the interest of balance, if the State has ever made any effort to quantify the positive contribution by the Churches in this State.

During the Covid crisis, when many people were dying on their own and isolated from their families, Deputy Toibin cited the support they got from many religious in this State. “Many religious buried people during the Covid crisis at great threat to themselves. They were the only group the State never thanked for the help provided during Covid”, he said.

A report in the New York Times details the case of a prosperous Chinese businessman, Xu Wenjun, who wanted a son to continue the family line. In Cambodian court testimony, Xu said his wife could not bear a child. But Xu’s friends said he had no wife and was open about being gay.

In 2017, Xu signed a contract with an agency agreeing to pay €70,000 for surrogacy in Cambodia, using a “Russian model” as an egg donor, and a Cambodian woman to carry the child to birth. This was despite the Cambodian Ministry of Health announcing a ban on the practice the previous year.

“Surrogacy means women are willing to sell babies and that counts as trafficking,” said one Cambodian official. “We do not want Cambodia to be known as a place that produces babies to buy.”

In 2018, about 30 surrogates, all pregnant, were nabbed in a police raid on an upmarket housing complex in Phnom Penh. Dozens of surrogates were arrested, accused of trafficking the babies they were carrying.

Xu’s surrogate gave birth in prison, but was given a suspended sentence on condition that she raise the child herself, even though she has no genetic connection to the boy.

Xu himself was later arrested in a police sting and has now spent the last three years in prison.