If Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill becomes law, the ECHR may well extend it

Kim Leadbeater, (C), the Labour MP behind the proposed bill, joins campaigners in Parliament Square on October 16, 2024 in London
Kim Leadbeater, (C), the Labour MP behind the proposed bill, joins campaigners in Parliament Square on October 16, 2024 in London

Section 2 of the Suicide Act 1961 currently makes it a criminal offence to help someone commit suicide. Kim Leadbeater’s Private Member’s Bill seeks to change this. Subject to some supposed safeguards, it will no longer be a criminal offence to assist someone’s suicide if the prospective victim is a terminally ill adult in the final months of life.

Many arguments can be made as to why this would be a bad change in the law. As an academic lawyer, I’ll limit myself to the legal ones. A worrying aspects of other countries’ assisted suicide laws is the way they’ve expanded over time.

In Canada the law used to require someone’s natural death to be reasonably foreseeable before medical assistance could be offered to bring it prematurely to an end. That requirement has been dropped, and euthanasia is set to become available for those with mental illness in 2027. The mentally ill can already obtain help to end their lives in the Netherlands, and it’s now proposed to extend assisted suicide to elderly people deemed, rather ominously, to have lived “completed lives”. In Oregon restrictions on assisted suicide to terminal illness are now being criticised as “barriers to access”.

Dozens of MPs are already calling for Leadbeater’s Bill to be expanded to people who are “incurably suffering”. And that’s before it’s made it to the statute book. Yet supporters of the Bill insist assisted suicide will be limited and immune to gradual future extension. They point to the fact that in the United Kingdom, Parliament is sovereign. If the law is to expand further, it’ll require Parliament’s express permission first.

Yet those invoking parliamentary sovereignty fail to mention the UK’s obligations in international law. They forget our responsibilities under the European Convention on Human Rights. While Parliament is free as a matter of constitutional law to pass laws contrary to the Convention, doing so could lead to an adverse judgment from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And recently both the Attorney General and the Lord Chancellor have made speeches on the importance of international law, human rights and the rule of law.

At home our own courts are required, under the Human Rights Act, to take Strasbourg judgments into account. They must interpret laws passed by Parliament, “[s]o far as it is possible to do so”, in a way that secures compliance with the Convention. And if they can’t extend the meaning of a law to make it meet the demands of European human rights, they can issue a “declaration of incompatibility”, which governments of all political stripes have invariably followed.

Importantly, the Human Rights Act allows the government to change a law when it is declared incompatible with the Convention without asking Parliament to pass a new Act.

Is it conceivable that Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide law could breach the European Convention? Scholars on both sides of the assisted suicide debate have suggested it could.

The European court has recognised that bans on assisted suicide interfere with a person’s right to respect private life under article 8 of the Convention. But blanket bans have been accepted on the grounds that they’re necessary to protect the vulnerable.

Once the UK’s ban is partially lifted, however, it’ll be much more difficult to justify excluding other groups from assisted suicide. If it’s possible to lift the ban for terminally ill people, why not those suffering from non-terminal disabilities or people experiencing chronic mental illness?

Article 14 of the Convention prevents states from discriminating on grounds of disability and illness. The Strasbourg court has said it will subject any laws that do this to particularly intense scrutiny.

Most European assisted suicide laws aren’t as deliberately limited as the one being proposed for the UK. There can be no guarantees as to how so discriminatory a law will fare when the inevitable legal challenge is brought.

None of this is an argument for a wider assisted suicide law. But no one supporting the Leadbeater Bill can claim with certainty that assisted suicide won’t expand in the future.

The slippery slope is not a fiction, invented by scaremongering opponents of assisted suicide. It’s a real possibility baked into our present law. And those seeking legal change need to acknowledge this and stop burying their heads in the sand.


Dr Philip Murray is an assistant professor in Law at Robinson College, Cambridge