The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has ruled that it is for national authorities to determine when the right to life begins, rejecting a demand that a French doctor who accidentally killed an unborn child should be charged with manslaughter.
A panel of 17 judges said there was no consensus on the right to life of the unborn among countries that have signed the European Convention on Human Rights. "The court considered that the issue of when the right to life begins was a question to be decided at the national level. The court was convinced that it was neither desirable, nor even possible as matters stood, to answer in the abstract the question whether the unborn child was a person," the judges said in their ruling.
The court rejected an appeal by Mrs Thi-Nho Vo, a French national of Vietnamese origin, against the French government for failing to charge the doctor whose mistake led to the termination of her pregnancy.
On November 27th, 1991, Mrs Vo, who was five months pregnant, attended Lyons General Hospital for a routine medical examination. On the same day another woman with an almost identical name was due to have a coil removed at the same hospital. When the doctor who was to remove the coil called out the name in the waiting room, it was the wrong Mrs Vo who answered.
The doctor noticed that Mrs Vo had difficulty understanding French but, consulting the wrong medical file, he sought to remove the coil without examining her beforehand. In so doing, he pierced the amniotic sac causing the loss of a substantial amount of amniotic fluid and making it impossible to proceed with the pregnancy.
Mrs Vo originally lost her criminal complaint of unintentional homicide against the doctor in a French lower court and won it on appeal, only to see France's highest appeals court overturn it in 1999 on the grounds that a foetus was not legally a person, and therefore did not enjoy the right to life.
Mrs Vo appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the French authorities' failure to allow a charge of unintentional homicide was in breach of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states: "Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally, save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law."
The court said it was unable to determine the extent to which the article protected the right to life of a foetus and that the issue of when the right to life begins must be determined at a national level.