Euthanasia is a human right

The argument

The case begins from the right to life and reads it as a right held by the person whose life it is. A right of that kind is not merely a protection against being killed; it carries with it self-determination, autonomy and dignity, because a life one does not control is not fully one's own. The same reasoning that makes it wrong for the state to end a citizen's life against their wishes makes it wrong for the state to compel a citizen to continue one against their wishes. Both are decisions about the person taken out of the person's hands. Terminal illness is where the two come apart in practice. A patient facing a painful and incurable condition is not choosing between living and dying; the illness has already settled that. What remains is how the end comes and how much suffering is endured before it. To refuse that patient a legal route to end their life is to insist that they bear the suffering anyway, for reasons that are not their own, at the point where their capacity for a dignified existence is already at its lowest. Autonomy means little if it lapses precisely when the decisions become hardest. Nor is there any party with a better claim to make the decision. The state has an interest in preventing coercion and abuse, but that is an argument for regulating euthanasia rather than prohibiting it. Physicians have professional obligations, and those obligations are owed to the patient and defined by the patient's interests, not set against them. Families have feelings, not authority. Once a person is competent to decide and has decided, nobody else is in a position to overrule them. On this reasoning, access to euthanasia is not a special permission to be granted but the application of a right already held, and the law should recognise it as such.

Context

Article 6.1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights approved by the United Nations states, that "every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life". Proponents of legal euthanasia argue that the human right to life should also include a one's right to die with dignity. The refusal to grant it violates the freedom of an individual.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Various formulations of the right to life do not imply the opposite "right to die" - such interpretation is unfounded and not recognized by the majority of international tribunals and law academics.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] The right to life is concerned only with an unlawful and arbitral deprivation of life. It does not give a right of choosing death over life to an individual.