Belfast, UK, Dec 2, 2015 / 06:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Irish pro-life advocates have said Monday's Northern Ireland court decision against abortion restrictions wrongly ignored the lives of the unborn in the name of fighting human rights violations. “I’m deeply disappointed by the decision of the High Court,” Michael Kelly, editor of the Dublin-based newspaper The Irish Catholic, told CNA Dec. 1. “I believe the High Court to be profoundly wrong in side-stepping the inescapable fact that abortion ends the life of an innocent child.” Kelly rejected claims that change in the law would be limited to certain circumstances. “International experience shows that there is no such thing as limited abortion: once the principle is conceded that it can ever be justified to target the innocent unborn child in the womb for death, wider access to abortion is inevitable.” Justice Mark Horne of Northern Ireland’s High Court on Nov. 30 ruled that the lack of exceptions in Northern Ireland abortion law violates women’s rights under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. He said exceptions should be made in cases of fatal fetal abnormality at any time during pregnancy, and also in cases of pregnancy as the result of sexual crime up until the time when the unborn baby can live independently of his or her mother. He said a woman “has to face all the dangers and problems, emotional or otherwise, of carrying a fetus for which she bears no moral responsibility and is merely a receptacle to carry the child of a rapist and/or a person who has committed incest, or both” and that enforcement of the anti-abortion law “completely ignores the personal circumstances of the victim.” Horne said that when the unborn baby suffers from abnormalities that will be fatal, “there is no life to protect.” “There is nothing to weigh in the balance,” the justice added. “When the fetus leaves the womb, it cannot survive independently. It is doomed.” Niamh Uí Bhriain of the pro-life Life Institute said the ruling was “deeply flawed and discriminatory.” She particularly objected to its treatment of unborn babies with disabilities. “It is extraordinary to see a High Court judge use such cruel and thoughtless language which will have been enormously hurtful to the majority of parents who carry their sick babies to term and who cherish every moment with their babies, most of whom do live beyond birth,” she said Nov. 30. Uí Bhriain said she hoped the ruling would be appealed as soon as possible. Northern Ireland’s Catholic bishops, headed by Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, said it was “profoundly disquieting” that the court weighed one life against another. They said that unborn children are persons and the decision does not change “our duty to respect and protect their right to life.” “Our day to day pastoral experience teaches us that even in the hardest of hard cases society cannot forget that human life is sacred and always deserving of our utmost protection, compassion and care. The Catholic Church teaches that the duty to care for and protect human life extends equally to a mother and her unborn child in all circumstances,” said the bishops’ Nov. 30 statement. The bishops cited Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si', in which he stressed the need to protect human life at its earliest stages. The Pope warned that the loss of sensitivity towards accepting a new life means “other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away.” Kelly said the court’s ruling for a right to abortion in the case where the child has been conceived in a crime “takes no account of the fact that abortion means that an innocent child, who played no part in the crime that led to his or her conception, will be killed.”  He said such an act would be “further compounding the injustice of the terrible crime of rape.” He reflected on the overall political climate of the decision. “Northern Ireland is one of the last places in the western world to resist the push for widespread availability of abortion. It’s no surprise that the region comes under immense pressure from a coalition of so-called human rights groups and pro-choice advocacy organizations (generally funded from overseas).” “They will have a fight on their hands: amidst decades of sectarian strife, one of the few things that united the vast majority people of Northern Ireland was a revulsion for abortion. Similarly, many politicians are unshakable in their pro-life credentials,” he said. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission had brought the case to the court. Les Allamby, the body’s chief commissioner, said the result is “historic” and “will be welcomed by many of the vulnerable women and girls who have been faced with these situations.” The Northern Ireland Assembly has been consistent in opposition to laws that permit abortion, according to Kelly. He said the Human Rights Commission bypassed these institutions. “This seems like an extreme act of legal activism,” he said of the High Court ruling. “I find it extraordinary that the case to liberalize the law on abortion in Northern Ireland was brought by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, a body set up by the peace treaty of 1998 which brought an end 30 years of sectarian conflict and violence.” “It seems perverse that a body set up to defend and vindicate human rights actually took a case to the High Court asking that the inalienable right to life of the most vulnerable, children in the womb, be removed from the safety of legal protection.” Northern Ireland Attorney General John Larkin said he was “profoundly disappointed” in the decision and is considering whether to appeal. An appeal must be filed within six weeks, the BBC reports. Read more

Geneva, Switzerland, Dec 2, 2015 / 04:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- No longer relegated to mere science-fiction, robots – built to kill people – play an increasing role in fighting terrorism alongside other new weapons of war. But what's resulting in a mounting headache for the United Nations in terms of checks and sanctions is actually something that the Church can and should speak into, say Catholic leaders, including the Vatican. With the nickname “killer robots,” fully autonomous weapons are designed with the ability to choose and engage targets without human involvement. Drones, a prototype for this kind of artillery, are already in use by multiple countries across the globe including the United States, Russia, China and the U.K. At the UN's Geneva “Convention on Inhumane Weapons” in early November, Tony D'Costa, general secretary of the Irish section of the International Catholic Peace Movement Pax Christi, spoke out that the presence of the Church was necessary at the gathering. “Why is it important to take part in it from a Catholic perspective? It goes without saying that we have to be present here, in order to change the world for the better and to translate the hope and the values of the Gospel into reality,” D'Costa said. In its contribution to the dialogue in Geneva, representatives from the Holy See highlighted the questionable aspects of a specific document called the “Agreement on Explosive Remnants of War,” also known as “Protocol 5.” “Given an ethical responsibility and the effort to provide for a peaceful and stable future world order, all participants share the responsibility to protect every single person on grounds of his or her own dignity,” said. Monsignor Richard Gyhra, chief secretary of the Holy See's UN embassy. “This applies irrespective of the wording of the agreement – be it weak or strong.” The aim of November's UN meeting was to prohibit or restrict the use of weapons, by which soldiers suffer unnecessarily or unjustifiably and which may harm civilians in a random manner. For his part, Tony D'Costa stressed that “humane killing” was a contradiction in itself. “Killing is never human. The Gospel teaches us that as well. Instead of killing, we should love and promote each other,” he said. “However, during the course of time war has developed into a means to resolve conflicts in the world and to dominate people, which is completely wrong according to our Christian perspective.” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the permanent observer of the Holy See at the UN in Geneva, warned during his testimony that respect for and compliance with international humanitarian law are increasingly ignored. “The principles of the law have at best become a mesmerizing litany,” he said. “Great principles are not able to ensure justice and peace. When they prove to be ineffective, we simply criticize their application.” “However, a practical implementation of international humanitarian law is the essential minimum needed against the inhumanity of armed conflicts.” The most urgent issue up for discussion at the event was the proposed preventive ban on fully autonomous weapons, which were described as especially dangerous due to their ability to select targets and attack them without any human intervention. “We would never want to leave those two issues to a machine,” added Mary Wareham of the international advocacy group “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.” “They should always remain under reasonable and appropriate or effective human control,” Warehem said during her intervention. “So what we expect from this debate is to get closer to a solution in this matter.” According to Steve Goose of the organization “Human Rights Watch,” the robots in question “are more than just weapons. They constitute a new kind of warfare, too. Excluding the human element completely from the decision-making process is something that has happened never before.” Speaking to Pax Press Agency, Tony D'Costa warned that killer robots run the risk of pushing humanity ever further from the bounds of an ethical and just society. “They will throw us far away from it,” he said. “That’s very dangerous, since the principle of humanity of our fundamental moral norms is what holds us together despite all human limitations.” After November's gathering in Geneva, the UN has agreed to a further, one-week diplomatic meeting in April 2016.Reprinted courtesy of Christian Peschken, Pax Press Agency. Photo credit: www.shutterstock.com. Read more