The Strasbourg-based Court for Human Rights of the Council of Europe has ruled that an involuntary therapeutic abortion due to a medical error is not a chargeable offence. The sentence of 13 July was issued by the court in response to the action brought by a French woman forced to undergo a therapeutic abortion in her sixth month of pregnancy, as a result of an examination to which she was subjected by error. The gynaecologist, first accused of involuntary injury and then of culpable homicide, had been condemned by the Court of Appeal of Lyon, but subsequently acquitted by the Supreme Court of Appeal in Paris. The Strasbourg Court substantially confirmed the sentence of the French Supreme Court, motivating the sentence with the “conviction that it is neither desirable, nor even possible, under present conditions, to reply in abstract to the question whether a foetus is a person on the basis of article 2 of the European Convention for the safeguard of human rights and fundamental liberties”. The judges reaffirmed the position according to which in view of the absence of agreement at the European level on the scientific and legal definition of the beginning of life it is up to the individual national legislator to decide on the question when the right to life sanctioned by the Convention ought to begin.
