ECLJ Defends Life Before the European Court of Human Rights

I want to report to you that our international affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), is working to protect human life.  On Friday, the ECLJ submitted an amicus brief urging the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France to protect the rights of the unborn in a closely-watched case called A., B., C. v. Ireland.

 

Our ECLJ representative, Grgor Puppinck, summarized the key aspects of this case:  the European Court of Human Rights will have to decide whether the Irish Constitutional ban of abortion respects the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. Beyond this issue, the Court will have to decide whether a safe and easy access to abortion can be considered as a human right in the Council of Europes 47 Member States.

 

The three applicants, A., B., and C., are represented before the Court by the Irish Family Planning Association.  Mainly, they complain that they had to travel to the United Kingdom to get an abortion.  According to her testimony, one of the applicants had to travel to England alone, in secrecy and with no money to spare, without alerting the social workers.  The testimony also stated that on her return to Ireland she experienced pain, nausea and bleeding for eight to nine weeks, but was afraid to seek medical advice because of the prohibition on abortion.  The second applicant had taken a morning-after pill, but it failed to stop the pregnancy and gave rise to a substantial risk of a dangerous pregnancy.  She decided to get an abortion in the UK. The third applicant, before becoming pregnant, was treated with chemotherapy for cancer for three years. She was uncertain about the risks involved, and decided to have an abortion. After the abortion, she suffered the complications of an incomplete abortion, including prolonged bleeding and infection.

 

The applicants argue before the European Court of Human Rights that the impossibility for them to have an abortion in Ireland made the procedure unnecessarily expensive, complicated and traumatic and that it stigmatized and humiliated them and risked damaging their health in breach of Article 3 of the Convention.  Among several other secondary arguments, they argue that:  the obligation they had to travel to the UK creates a discrimination based on the financial resources; that the term unborn in the national law on abortion is not sufficiently clear and precise; that they had no effective domestic remedy; and that an alleged lack of clear legal guidelines regarding the circumstances in which a woman may have an abortion to save her life, infringed upon her right to life under Article 2 of the Convention.

 

The ECLJ brief explained that an alleged human right to abortion is not included in the rights guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECLJ argues that the right to life guaranteed in the European Convention does not exclude the unborn from the scope of its protection; and, as the Court has stated in many cases, the Member States have sovereignty to decide when this protection should start. (i.e. from conception, or later.)  In its brief, the ECLJ also recalled that the right to protection of the unborn is a foundational human right, recognized in international conventions such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to which Ireland is signatory.

 

The ECLJ filed its amicus brief November 14th and was joined by the Family Research Council and the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in the filing.

 

Over the past years, the ECLJ has been involved in all major pro-life cases.  The pro-abortion lobby has been continuously trying to get from the ECHR an international recognition of a human right to abortion.  Until now, the Court has been trying to only tolerate abortion where it is allowed.  With this new case, the pro-abortion lobby pushes the Court further: the Court is asked to consider if, by a way, the European Convention on Human Rights includes implicitly a right to abortion.

 

In this regard, the ECLJ has invited the Court to affirm that the only possible answer is No.  In order for the Court to reach a conclusion that there is a right to abortion, the Member States would have to modify the European Convention on Human Rights.

 

You can read the ECLJ amicus brief here.  You can read the ECHR official Statement of Facts here. 

 

This is a very important case, and well keep you posted as developments unfold.