The ‘right to life’... twisted into the right to kill

‘HUMAN rights’ is a very stretchable term, as we all know. But I never saw it stretched so far as it was last week, when the Belfast High Court ruled that a right to life was, in fact, a right to death, and indeed a right to kill.

It decided that Northern Ireland’s laws restricting abortion breached Europe’s human rights convention. Abortion is illegal in the province unless there is a direct threat to the mother’s life, or a risk of permanent and serious damage to her mental or physical health, a position many would regard as a reasonable compromise. But the ever ambitious, ever-liberal ‘Supreme’ Court in London had already paved the way for this ruling by deciding any limit somehow breaches Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. How? This article says nothing at all about abortion, but simply enshrines ‘private and family life’. It also says the courts can override privacy to intervene ‘for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others’. Well, how about the right to life of the baby being aborted? Isn’t that ‘the rights and freedoms of others’?

Article 2 actually says ‘everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law’. Everyone’s. Not just some people’s. How then can it have been interpreted to create a right to abortion? The authors of the convention never imagined it was any such thing. This shocking twisting of its meaning is the best argument I can think of against the Rule of Lawyers we now endure.