The Definitive Primacy of Patient Autonomy over the Right to Life? Commentary on the Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of 4 September 2022 on the Case of Mortier v. Belgium (appl. no. 78017/17)

Abstract

This Commentary is an in-depth critical study of the European Court of Human Rights ruling in Mortier v. Belgium. The authors present the facts and the tribunal’s decision against the background of the ECtHR’s previous case law on terminally ill patients. Unlike Polish law, euthanasia and assisted suicide are permissible under Belgian law; thus, for the first time in its existence, the tribunal addressed not so much the permissibility of euthanasia as it examined the circumstances of its use. In this regard, it was critical for the authors to look at the ECtHR reasoning on the interplay between Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in order to answer the question of whether there has been an evolution or a revolution in the interpretation of the two laws. In the case of the rights of terminally ill patients, the issue is the right to make end-of-life decisions in accordance with the patient’s wishes, and whether the paradigm of patient autonomy has become the highest value in the doctor–patient relationship; this hich could also be indicated by recent changes to the International Code of Medical Ethics and the international text of the Hippocratic Oath (the Declaration of Geneva). In this context, it also becomes valuable to analyse the changes made to the Polish Code of Medical Ethics, which came into effect on 1 January 2025.