Mental health law varies by country, even within the UK. As soon as you start comparing mental health laws in non-British countries with our own approach you see even more ways to that such complex matters are handled. In Germany, the courts play a far greater role in psychiatric admission than in the UK where they are usually not involved at all. As if that’s not enough, where a person’s mental health becomes relevant to criminal proceedings it all moves up one or two more notches and as Professor Jill Peay noted (in Mental Health and Crime, 2010) the work done at the interface of mental health and criminal justice is amongst the most challenging of all.
The Court of Cassation in Paris, France’s highest court, has recently ruled that a man who admitted killing a woman in her sixties will not stand trial. Kobili Traoré admits killing Sarah Halimi in 2017 by beating her and then throwing her from the window of her third-floor Paris apartment in what was described as an “anti-semitic frenzy”. Psychiatric reports stated that he was...
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