Abstrakt
Last year, the 20th anniversary of the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine was celebrated (not only) across Europe. After its ratification in 2001, the Convention entered into force in the Czech Republic in the situation of a continuing paternalistic understanding of the physician-patient relationship and the corresponding legal regulation.
While in many member states of the Council of Europe the content of the Convention already represented a consensual set of basic rules, Czech medical law had to undergo a deep change in order to comply with the Convention. After many particular amendments, the medical law reform peaked in the adoption of three reform acts and the new Civil Code in 2011 and 2012, respectively.
The article can also be understood as a case study of the profound influence of an international law document on the development of national law in a specific area of regulation.