There is no human right to assisted suicide
by Conor Casey, Artillery Row:
Lady Hale is wrong about the existing laws.
Ten years ago this week, the Supreme Court declined to rule that the Suicide Act’s prohibition on assisted suicide was a breach of Convention rights. The judgment, R (Nicklinson) v Ministry of Justice, has been much discussed since then. It has also been much misunderstood, partly because some of the judges in the majority indicated that they might in a future case conclude that the ban on assisted suicide was unjustified. The two judges in dissent, Lady Hale and Lord Kerr, would have ruled then and there that the 1961 Act was incompatible with the Convention’s right to private life.
Lady Hale has now returned to the fray, coming out in support of the My Death, My Decision campaign against the ban on assisted suicide. Speaking this week at an event to mark the tenth anniversary of the Nicklinson judgment, Lady Hale has dubbed the legislation “cruel and inhumane” for forcing persons to “go on living against their will”. She adds “Of course, there must be proper safeguards to make sure that their decisions are freely made”, but, as in her dissenting judgment, fails to establish that adequate safeguards could be devised. Indeed, writing-extrajudicially Lady Hale explicitly stated that her conclusion was reached “by reference to principle rather than evidence.”
In many of her judgments and speeches, Lady Hale has been keen to insist that the courts protect minority rights from the democratic process. But in this context, she thinks that respect for human rights and democracy alike require the law to change. Referring to the Nicklinson judgment, Lady Hale says that “Five of the nine Justices held the court could make a declaration that the current law banning assisted suicide was incompatible with…human rights”. The reason that three of the five did not join her and Lord Kerr was, she says, that they thought that “Parliament should be given the opportunity of putting things right first”.
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