Dr Stevie Martin’s PhD thesis to be published as a book

LML are delighted to announce that Dr Stevie Martin’s PhD thesis, ‘Assisted Suicide and the European Convention on Human Rights’, is to be published by Routledge.

This book will examine the human rights implication of the ban on assisted suicide in England and Wales. More specifically, it will consider whether the Suicide Act 1961 is compatible with the right to life (Article 2, European Convention on Human Rights), the right to freedom from inhuman or degrading treatment (Article 3, European Convention on Human Rights), and the right to choose the manner and timing of one’s death (an aspect of private life protected by Article 8, European Convention on Human Rights).

While the compatibility of the ban with Article 8 has been the subject of considerable legal and academic debate, the ban’s relationship with Articles 2 and 3 has been neglected since the House of Lords and European Court of Human Rights ruled that they did not apply in Diane Pretty’s seminal case. Following recent developments in comparative jurisdictions and in light of domestic case law regarding Article 3, this book revisits the Articles 2 and 3 in the context of assisted dying, concluding that the Suicide Act 1961 does, in fact, violate those rights for a considerable number of individuals who are compelled to take their lives prematurely or who face painful, prolonged and undignified deaths.

Drawing on that jurisprudence and considering empirical evidence from permissive jurisdictions (the number of which is steadily growing, with over 200 million people now living in jurisdictions with assisted dying systems), this book will illustrate the errors in the domestic courts’ approach to Article 8 in cases involving the Suicide Act 1961, and concludes that Lady Hale and Lord Kerr were correct in Nicklinson to find that the ban violates Article 8. This book goes further than the existing case law and academic debate, not only because of its inclusion of Articles 2 and 3, but because its focus is not limited to individuals with terminal conditions, nor is it confined to assisted suicide. Instead, it considers the human rights implications of both the ban on assisted suicide and the prohibition of euthanasia for individuals with grievous and irremediable medical conditions, which includes conditions that are not terminal but that have resulted in an irreversible decline of capability and are causing the individual intolerable suffering.

The conclusions reached in this book profoundly alter the existing narrative surrounding the Suicide Act 1961 and its human rights implications and will be directly relevant to future challenges to the ban before the courts as well as to the form of any amendments proposed to be made to the Act.