‘At the beginning of April 2019, a Press Association report of an interim hearing at the Court of Protection provoked a number of newspaper headlines and outraged reactions, because it quoted a High Court judge, Mr Justice Hayden, as having spoken of a “fundamental human right” of a man to have sex with his wife. This was in the course of a preliminary hearing in the Court of Protection, a court which makes decisions about and on behalf of adults who lack mental capacity to make decisions themselves. The Court of Protection can decide whether or not an adult lacks mental capacity to make decisions about sexual relations, and if he or she does not, make orders which protect the adult as far as possible from having sexual relations, by imposing restrictions on their freedom of contact with other people. The Court cannot make a decision about whether or not to have sexual relations on behalf of an incapacitated adult, as that is an intimate personal decision which no-one can take on behalf of anyone else. The law’s approach to capacity to marry is exactly the same.’

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Transparency Project, 20th May 2019

Source: www.transparencyproject.org.uk