Director of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), Expert at the Council of Europe. This article synthesises a section of a study on “Abortion and the European Convention on Human Rights” that will be published in the coming weeks.
The European Court of Human Rights (the Court) has issued several judgments on abortion, especially in recent years since the fundamental ruling of the Grand Chamber in A. B. and C. v. Ireland of 2010. In those cases, the Court found violations of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) in specific situations where the life or the health of the pregnant woman was endangered, or when the pregnancy was the consequence of a rape. The purpose of this article is firstly to identify the rationale of the Court on the matter of abortion, and secondly to observe how it applies to the vast majority of abortions practiced, i.e. “abortion on demand”, also called on request: abortions that are not justified by a matter of health, life or rape, but by the free will of the woman.
Through its various rulings, the Court explicitly declared that abortion is not a right under the Convention: there is no right to have an abortion (Silva Monteiro Martins Ribeiro v. Portugal) or to practice it (Jean-Jacques Amy v. Belgium). The prohibition per se of abortion by a State does not violate the Convention, (Silva Monteiro Martins Ribeiro v. Portugal see also the case of the first two applicants who unsuccessfully complained of the prohibition of abortion on demand in A. B. and C. v. Ireland), but States can allow it for the sake of competing rights guaranteed by the Convention, i.e. the life and the health of the pregnant woman. In other words, it can be said that the Court tolerates an abortion if it is justified by a proportionate motive protected by the Convention. Read the rest of this entry…
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