IZVANPARNIČNI POSTUPAK U SPORU IZMEĐU DJETETA I RODITELJA O ZDRAVLJU DJETETA
NON-CONTENTIOUS PROCEDURE IN A DISPUTE BETWEEN A CHILD AND PARENTS ON THE CHILD’S HEALTH

Summary/Abstract: The Croatian Family Act of 2015 took an important step towards recognising the autonomy of a child to give informed consent to medical procedures. A child who has reached the age of sixteen and who according to the assessment of a medical doctor, has the information necessary to form his or her own opinion on a specific matter and is mature enough to make a decision about a preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic procedure related to his or her health or treatment, may independently give informed consent to an examination, test or medical procedure. With this, the Croatian Family Act moved away from the principle of a priori incapacity of the child as a patient to give informed consent. However, the medical doctor’s assessment is important, not only on the maturity of the child but also on the nature of the specific medical procedure. Based on the recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (General Comment No. 4 (2003) on adolescent health; General Comment No. 20 (2016) on the implementation of the rights of the child during adolescence) and the Council of Europe guidelines on child-friendly health care (2011), the paper analyses and discusses various situations in Croatian law regarding the autonomy of the child as a patient. In particular, situations of medical procedures where, in addition to the child’s consent, parental consent is also required are discussed. Within this framework, certain pro￾cedural issues of the non-contentious court procedure for determining the parent who will represent the child and of the procedure for replacing the consent of (both) parents are analysed, namely prior application to the Croatian Institute for Social Work for mandatory counselling, active legitimation of the child for initiating the procedure, evidentiary procedure, decision and effectiveness of decision. In the last part of the paper a summary synthesis of the main research results is presented.

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