COLOGNE SAVES BOYS' WILLIES FROM KNIFE

PROTES.....Anti-circumcision protesters march in San Francisco.

A WIDELY criticised German court verdict on religious circumcision aims only to delay the act, not ban it, and is not directed against any faith, said a jurist with a leading role in the legal debate.

The operation does serious bodily harm and only males old enough to consent to it freely should undergo it, said Holm Putzke, law professor at Passau University in southern Germany. Using arguments he had published in recent years, a court in the western city of Cologne ruled that the circumcision of a boy who suffered post-operative bleeding had violated a law against causing bodily harm.

Religious leaders denounced the ruling as a serious intrusion on their freedom. Even the foreign minister spoke out, saying such faith traditions must be allowed in a tolerant modern society.

"I can understand that this verdict has irritated people around the world, but this irritation can be resolved if people look at the reasons for it," Putzke told Reuters. "Nobody wants to ban religious circumcision, not at all," he said. "It should just be decided by those who undergo it."

Suggesting opposition to circumcision was aimed against any religion was dishonest, he said. The time for religious circumcision varies according to family, region and country.

The court ruling said the four-year-old boy in the case was not old enough to consent to have part of his body removed permanently and his parents should have let him decide when he got older. It gave no minimum age for this.

Putzke said an article he published five years ago in a medical journal led to lively debates among doctors, especially those called on to perform circumcisions. "It quickly became clear that a large majority of doctors in clinics objected to medically unnecessary circumcisions," he said. "They said they went against the Hippocratic Oath."

The doctor who treated the boy for post-operative bleeding reported the case to the police, leading them to bring charges against the person who performed the faulty circumcision. The judge consulted academic articles in legal and medical journals before making his decision, Putzke said.

"This is not simply a verdict from some misguided court," he added. "Somebody sat down and thought long and hard about the fundamental legal rights involved."

The verdict, which is valid only in the Cologne area, could "send a signal" he said, but it wasn't clear if other courts would follow this example. He didn't know of any similar cases before other courts in Germany.

Putzke said he began studying the issue of circumcision and children's rights after his law professor pointed out to him and other students that violence against children was widely condemned in all cases but these. "Even the Muslim students were surprised by this," he said.

He hoped religious communities would be open to debating the issue and not refuse to consider any change to their traditions. (Reuters)