Against Self-Government

The Council of Europe is, in theory, meant to be some sort of bulwark for the citizens of its member countries against the power of the overreaching state.

That’s the theory. But here’s how it really works. The Daily Mail reports:

The Council of Europe has ruled that euthanasia and assisted suicide should be banned in every country across the Continent. In a declaration that will have huge implications on human rights laws in its 47 member countries, the Strasbourg-based organisation announced that such practices ‘must always be prohibited’.

The move will represent a major setback to assisted dying campaigners in the UK who want Britain to follow Holland, Belgium and Switzerland in allowing doctors to help to end the lives of their patients. The explicit condemnation of euthanasia was inserted into a non-binding resolution entitled ‘Protecting Human Rights and Dignity by Taking Into Account Previously Expressed Wishes of Patients’.

The resolution had originally simply focused on the human rights questions of ‘advance directives’, or ‘living wills’, in which people set out how they wish to be treated if they became mentally incapacitated.

But members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe argued that living wills, which became legal in the UK under the 2005 Mental Capacity Act, were inextricably connected to euthanasia. They successfully moved an amendment forbidding euthanasia by 34 votes to 16 with six abstentions.

The amendment said that ‘euthanasia, in the sense of the intentional killing by act or omission of a dependent human being for his or her alleged benefit must always be prohibited’.

Among those fighting for the amendment was British member Edward Leigh, the Tory MP for Gainsborough.

It’s that “always” that sticks in the craw. What it means (thankfully the resolution is not binding) is that Leigh, and those like him, are insisting that their prejudices should prevail over an individual’s power to decide his or her own fate. The consequences of such absolutism can, of course, be grotesque suffering. A patient with locked-in syndrome, for example, who wishes to end it all has no need to worry about some “slippery slope”. He is already a prisoner, imprisoned in a body that has become its own dungeon, guarded by doctors who have thrown away the key.

And quite why Leigh, a Tory supposedly, a euroskeptic allegedly, believes that a transnationalist body should have the power to police Britons in this way escapes me. He is, it appears, an opponent of the right of Britons to govern themselves — and in more ways than one.

Appalling.