In an article on the BBC news, titled “Britons who chose assisted suicide”[1] the reporter talks about a charity clinic in Switzerland which assists people in committing suicide. The article quotes that to date ‘Dignitas’ has helped 40 people from the UK in assisted suicide. While there are examples given of those terminally ill patients who chose a ‘dignified’ death as opposed to ebbing away, it also quotes a couple who were not assumed to be terminally ill, and who still chose to die by taking lethal doses of barbiturates. Apparently the same clinic offers their services to those people who they think need it, as in the case of Diane Pretty. Ms. Pretty however turned down their request and chose to challenge UK’s law on assisted suicide. However her claim that she had the fundamental human right to ‘choose’ death was rejected by the Public prosecutor, the High Court and the Law Lords. The European Court of Human Rights also discarded her claim, that the UK courts had disregarded her Human Right.
I was perhaps forced to consider, what has been propagated as, a fundamental question of human rights (HR), on reading this article, and that was HR’s claim to universality. If it is agreed that there is such a notion as HR then perhaps there ought to be a consensus about what HR entails, what all it encompasses, and critical issues such as the right to one’s life, as perhaps an issue of ownership, ought to be resolved. From this article it can be inferred that Switzerland does allow assisted suicide, on what basis if so? And why is it that UK laws are then so conservative in their approach? Perhaps in order to give man the right to choose life inevitably makes ones life one’s property, and then one can justify selling his life, hence body, for the sake of money, for he can do as he pleases with it. Does it constitute a Human Right, according to the European Court of Human Rights, no. Should HR be defined by a single body if it is a universal concept? Who better to decide this concept, and what it entails, if not the people who are unfortunately faced by circumstances where they need to exercise such rights, if these are indeed rights?
Perhaps there is no answer to that on an individual level but not only is the ‘one party defining HR’ a strike against HR, but it is also a question of who decides and can one standard apply to all, or is it that people are getting carried away with the concept of Human rights to try and get away with what they want by qualifying it as such?
Contributed by: Law Student Lahore University of Management Sciences, 2008[1] Britons who choose assisted suicide, BBC news < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4643802.stm>
