Man’s justice is not perfect, not even that of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In a striking turn of events, it appears that the Court made a manifest legal error in the well known Lambert judgment (Lambert and others v. France, n°46043/14, Grand Chamber, 5 June 2014) by wrongly referring to its own case-law. In the Lambert case, that Court ruled that the French authorities could stop the artificial hydration and nutrition of Mr Lambert.
Glass v. United Kingdom judgment (n° 61827/00, Fourth Section, 9 March 2004) is one of the most important decisions the Court refers to in Lambert to support its decision. Indeed, the Court quotes Glass five times. In Glass, similarly to in Lambert, the mother of a child hospitalized for respiratory disorders complained about the the medical team’s decision to administer to her minor son, against her will, a high dose of morphine that risked causing his death. The doctors elected to not resuscitate him in the event of a respiratory crisis. Wishing to defend her son’s life, the patient’s mother brought her case to the ECtHR, as in the Lambert case.
In Glass, the Court ruled that: “the decision of the authorities to override the second applicant’s objection to the proposed treatment in the absence of authorisation by a court resulted in a breach of Article 8 of the Convention.” It “unanimously [held] that there [had] been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention.” Under this precedent, doctors should either respect the will of a patient’s parent or obtain an injunction against the parent’s decision. This precedent supports the position of Lambert’s parents. However, in the Lambert judgment the Grand Chamber stated erroneously that, in the Glass judgment, the Court “held that there had been no violation of Article 8 of the Convention.” (Paragraph 138). This error is found in the “general considerations” presenting the case law and supporting the Court’s decision. It is impossible to accurately determine the implications of this error on the Court’s reasoning, but it allows the Grand Chamber to affirm, in support of its own conclusion, that “it did not find a violation of the Convention in any of these cases.” (Paragraph 139). Read the rest of this entry…
