ABSTRACT
Under the scheme, the court must adhere to the five requirements of the Carership law and, in Germany, the legality of the doctor’s non-consensual intervention depends on the strict adherence to legal rules and not on anything like a Bolam test ([1957] 1 WLR 582) in English law, namely, whether a responsible body of clinical opinion would have supported the doctor’s medical intervention as being in the ward’s best interests (see Chapter 8). Another noteworthy point is that, despite the issue of a new Practice Note or Practice Direction in England in 1996 in response to the latest case decided there, the German Carership is, on balance, more protective than the latest English position because the mere likelihood of sexual activity in the future would not be sufficient to justify non-consensual sterilisation in Germany.
