Whose Right to What Life? Assisted Suicide and the Right to Life as a Fundamental Right

This article discusses the way in which the right to life, as a core human right and one of the most fundamental elements of the European Convention on Human Rights, values life and is founded on individual life. It is interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights as the right not to be killed, but in cases of (assisted) suicide it is, furthermore, invoked to oppose the right to self-determination. This article targets this use of the right to life in arguments against assisted suicide, arguing that if the right to life limits a conscious individual’s autonomous decisions about his own life, then it must value life in a sense external to that individual, and hence can only be considered an individual right if attributed to an abstract subject beyond the empirical individual. This calls its fundamentality in question, and leaves the rights-based argument against assisted suicide in difficulty.