ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the compliance of law with the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) and it makes some recommendations for change. It has been demonstrated that law, at both domestic and European level, gives some protection to the manifestation of the religious beliefs of adult Jehovah’s Witnesses. It shows how the approach to the determination of legal capacity of children does not really work in practice and is not compliant with the PGC. The chapter seeks to relate primarily to children and, in many ways, to the way in which religious belief or religious upbringing can influence a child. Jehovah’s Witnesses and the issue of refusal of blood transfusions by children is one of the hardest cases of all. A child with a particular competence/intellectual ability can have a societal competence that allows him to make a decision that is proportionate to the child’s maturity, that is valid in a social world.
