The European Court of Human Rights, as the courts of the United Kingdom had done before in the various degrees of appeal, ruled in favor of the doctors of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, pediatric center in London, who ask to unplug the newborn ten months because he is suffering from a serious and rare disease considered incurable and which would make him suffer too much. A dramatic story with decidedly cruel implications that saw the child's young parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, attempting but unsuccessfully to bring their son to the United States to subject him to experimental treatments not available in Great Britain in a desperate attempt to save him from mitochondrial wasting syndrome. But they did not succeed despite having raised with a collection, in which 83 thousand people took part, as much as 1,3 million pounds, what was needed to pay for the transfer and the very expensive therapies in the USA. A hope had been nurtured in recent days by the European judges who had imposed preventive measures to continue to keep Charlie alive while waiting for the Strasbourg court to rule definitively. In their appeal, the child's parents claimed that the London hospital had blocked access to treatment to keep the child alive, thus violating the right to life and also the right to freedom of movement. Furthermore, they denounced the decisions of the British courts "as an unfair and disproportionate interference in their parental rights". But the European court ultimately rejected their petition taking into account "the considerable room for maneuver that states have in the sphere of access to experimental treatment for the terminally ill and in cases that raise delicate moral and ethical questions". It was therefore stated that the task of replacing the competent national authorities is not up to the Strasbourg court. Furthermore, the judges noted that "the decisions of the national courts were meticulous and accurate and reviewed in three levels of judgment with clear and extensive reasoning that sufficiently corroborated the conclusions reached by the judges". So now it's up to London doctors to decide when to pull the plug on Charlie.
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