Hungary is being forced to defend its ban on assisted suicide, as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) hears a case from a solicitor trying to overturn the law.
Oral hearings in the case of human rights lawyer and Hungarian national Dániel Karsai took place this week, although the ruling may not be handed down for another year.
Karsai, 46, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, in July 2021. In the United States, the neurodegenerative condition is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the Yankees’ first baseman, who died of the condition in 1941.
Karsai brought a suit against the Hungarian government for its ban on euthanasia and assisted suicide, which also prohibits helping someone travel to another country to end their life. He is asking the court to strike down the Hungarian law and hopes the ECHR will go as far as declaring a ‘right to die.’
Karsai worked at the ECHR for four years in the early 2000s. He gave the first arguments in his case himself, sitting in a wheelchair and surrounded by his legal team.
“No one should be faced with this,” Karsai said in his opening remarks, describing the situation as “extremely humiliating.”
He contends that the current ban is inhumane, deprives him of freedom of choice, and is discriminatory. Karsai argued that he faces a life of suffering and will be “imprisoned in his own body with no prospect of release except death.”
“Sooner or later, I will reach the point of meaningless existence,” Karsai said.
Lawyers for Budapest have argued that the Hungarian ban on assisted suicide is upheld by the same treaty that underpins the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically Article 2, which obliges signatories to protect the right to life. Budapest’s legal team compared the ban on assisted suicide to its ban on capital punishment, both based on the premise that humans cannot intervene to cause death.
They also argued that euthanasia is itself a form of discrimination as it is “grounded in an assumption that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability,” Zoltán Tallodi, a lawyer with the Hungarian justice ministry, told judges. He also said legalizing the practice would lead to governments ending the lives of the infirm or disabled, those considered unproductive.
The Alliance Defending Freedom along with UK-based NGO Care Not Killing also submitted an intervention to the court in favor of the Hungarian ban on assisted suicide.
“While Mr. Karsai’s condition demands our greatest compassion, we cannot abandon our essential human rights protections. Hungary is bound under European and international human rights law to safeguard human life,” said Jean-Paul Van De Walle, Legal Counsel for ADF International. “The right to life is inviolable, underlying all other human rights. Conversely, there is no so-called ‘right to die.’ Worldwide, only a tiny minority of countries allow assisted suicide.”
He was present at the court’s oral hearing in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
The organizations have also argued that legalising euthanasia leads to abuses, citing the case of Mortier v. Belgium in which the ECHR ruled that Belgium had violated the right to life of a woman killed by assisted suicide because there were several irregularities in the process designed to protect people from abuse of the practice. The court did not, though, strike down Belgium’s euthanasia law, one of the most liberal among the few countries that allow the practice.
Previously, the court has upheld euthanasia bans.
In the 2002 case involving a woman with ALS, Pretty v. United Kingdom, the ECHR ruled that the British ban on assisted suicide did not violate the Convention on Human Rights and was designed to prevent abuse of the infirm.
While both Portugal and Spain have recently decriminalised assisted suicide, the vast majority of European countries still outlaw the practice
