The push to create a right to assisted suicide is an international effort

Canada’s Supreme Court Creates Right to Assisted Suicide, Leaves Details Up to Parliament

by Ashton Ellis


Most Americans are probably not aware that the push to create a right to assisted suicide is an international effort. The Canadian Supreme Court has just ruled that parliament must enact laws allowing assisted suicide.

• Who needs a legislature when you’ve got a supreme court?

There’s something about social policy that entices judges to moonlight as legislators—and not just in the United States. On February 6, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canada’s ban on assisted suicide violates the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, the Court held inCarter v. Canada that the criminal penalty of up to fourteen years' imprisonment for aiding or abetting a suicide interferes with a patient’s rights to life, liberty, security, and equal treatment under the law.

The court relied on arguments very similar to those rejected by the United States Supreme Court in a pair of unanimous rulings against a right to assisted suicide in 1997 (Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill). In all of these cases, assisted suicide advocates argued that legalizing assisted suicide was necessary to protect a fundamental—but unstated—right protected by the nation’s constitution. If this hypothetical right to die (or, more accurately, right to assistance in killing oneself) is acknowledged, the government must overcome a high hurdle to justify infringing it. Claimants also argued that a violation of this right results in an unreasonable loss of equal protection or treatment.

In Carter, assisted suicide advocates won on both counts, and the result is a sweeping change in Canadian social policy.

• A Lack of Clear Definitions Endangers the Depressed ....
• Judicial Usurpation of the Legislative Function ....
• Dangerously Naïve about the Potential for Abuse ....

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