EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS UNANIMOUSLYUPHOLDS BRITISH SUICIDE LAW

By Burke Balch, J.D.

Director NRLC Department of Medical Ethics

On April 29, a seven-judge chamber of the European Court of Human Rights unanimously upheld the United Kingdom's assisting suicide statute against a claim by a woman terminally ill with Lou Gehrig's disease that it violates numerous provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The United Kingdom and a number of other European nations have by treaty adopted the 1950 convention, which since 1998 has been enforced by the international court based in Strasbourg, Germany.

Diane Pretty, who had sought permission for her husband to kill her without fear of prosecution, had previously lost in a British trial court and before the law lords of the House of Lords, who serve as Great Britain's highest domestic court.

The European court's opinion, by chamber President Matti Pellonpaa, warned, "It is not hard to imagine that an elderly person, in the absence of any pressure, might opt for a premature end to life if that were available, not from a desire to die or a willingness to stop living, but from a desire to stop being a burden to others."

The court determined that the convention's guarantee of the right to life does not, as Pretty argued, include a right to end life. "The thrust of [the guarantee] is to reflect the sanctity which, particularly in western eyes, attaches to life. ... An article with that effect cannot be interpreted as conferring a right to die or to enlist the aid of another in bringing about one's own death."

British law (like that in the United States) includes criminal penalties for one who assists a suicide but not for a person who attempts suicide. Pretty argued that this discriminates against someone whose disability prevents her from taking her own life, and would therefore require assistance in order to do so. The court responded that this argument is "based on a misconception." Pellonpaa wrote:

"The law confers no right to commit suicide. ... Suicide itself (and with it attempted suicide) was decriminalized because recognition of the common law offence was not thought to act as a deterrent, because it cast an unwarranted stigma on innocent members of the suicide's family and because it led to the distasteful result that patients recovering in hospital from a failed suicide attempt were prosecuted, in effect, for their lack of success.

"But while the 1961 Act abrogated the rule of law whereby it was a crime for a person to commit (or attempt to commit) suicide, it conferred no right on anyone to do so. Had that been its object there would have been no justification for penalizing by a potentially very long term of imprisonment one who aided, abetted, counseled or procured the exercise or attempted exercise by another of that right. The policy of the law remained firmly adverse to suicide."

The chamber's decision will become final three months after its date of issuance, unless during that time Pretty successfully seeks to have the case referred to the full Grand Chamber of all 17 judges of the European Court of Human Rights.