ABSTRACT
The legal justifi cation for granting validity to consent attracts different opinions. According to one view, consent is a corollary of the right to self-determination, which refers, in the Constitutional law sense (Article 17), to a person’s right to freely develop his/her own personality. 1 When a person is granted a right to full disposal over certain legal interests, he/she can choose, in connection with a concrete situation, to relinquish the abstract legal protection granted by the State over such rights. 2 This understanding may be said to refl ect the German-oriented ‘Social Value Theory’ according to which the validity granted to consent is premised on law policy thoughts. 3
Others rely on ‘the theory on waiver of rights’: a person who has been given the right to dispose over a right may also voluntarily choose to waive such right. 4
The ‘legal transaction’ theory also has its supporters; consent authorises the violation of a given right creating a legal transaction as penal law attaches legal consequences to such declaration. 5
justifying state intervention through penal sanctions.
