By BB
An easy-to-understand explanation of specific law-related issues.
DISCLAIMER: This information does not constitute legal advice; don’t get your legal advice from a newsletter, only get legal advice from a practising lawyer!
This is a really interesting time in Australia’s legal history. During this pandemic, complex and multi-layered public health laws can and have empowered the federal and state governments to take reasonable and sometimes extreme measures to minimise harms. (For the legislation hungry out there, see: section 190 of the Victorian Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2009 for a full list of ‘public health risk powers’ the state government has!). While we currently need the government to implement temporary measures to combat the pandemic and provide relief to those affected, there are other repercussions we should watch for. We should remain vigilant about the emergency powers being used by police to justify discrimination against minorities, scrutinise decisions of landlords to pursue evictions and interrogate decisions by bosses to stand down workers with no pay (if this happens, please contact JobWatch or the Fair Work Ombudsman to check whether this was legally done).
Despite the allure of delving into the new rules and regulations springing up during this pandemic, we resist: there are still too many other important legal questions to explore! Such as the fact that cannibalism isn’t specifically a crime.
Not to worry though — there are a number of state laws that, read together, basically make it illegal.
Section 34BB of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) says that a person will have committed an offence if they intentionally engaged in conduct involving ‘human remains’, and that conduct was ‘offensive’. The act goes on to define ‘offensive conduct’ as ‘if, in all the circumstances, it is likely to arouse significant anger, resentment, outrage, disgust or repulsion in the minds of reasonable people’. This section prohibits a wide array of conduct involving human body parts, and, assuming that the act of eating another person (dead or alive) is widely considered abhorrent in society, cannibalism is also caught by this law. Interestingly, you will still be committing an offence if you eat human remains if you had an ‘honest and reasonable belief’ that eating human remains was okay. Ignorance is famously no defence, and the lawmakers made sure to include this reminder!
For the detail-focused reader, ‘human remains’ is defined in section 3 of the Cemeteries and Crematoria Act 2003 (Vic) as including bodily remains, cremated human remains or body parts. ‘Body parts’ is further defined as ‘human tissue or a part of a person [that] is not part of a corpse’.
And so, if society gets to a point where we broadly consider cannibalism to be totally reasonable, new laws won’t need to be brought in abolishing cannibalism as a crime; it’ll just be legally permissible. This potentially explains why people are able to request eating their placenta after they have given birth
The Coburg Meddler 