Category Archives: Euthanasia

RASKC is here for you. If you need to bring your pet to the shelter, simply start by filling out the form. We accept dog and cat surrenders by appointment for owners who live within RASKC's jurisdiction. To make an appointment, please first submit this form. A RASKC representative will contact you to gather more information about you and your pet. Due to large numbers of surrenders, it may be eight to ten weeks before a surrender appointment becomes available.

Note: Owner surrender appointments typically take about 30 to 45 minutes. Please be prepared to bring a valid photo ID and any veterinary records you may have for your animal.

RASKC schedules appointments for owner surrendered pets to ensure that we have enough resources available when each new pet arrives. This appointment allows our team a chance to sit down with you to gather more information and discuss what the best possible options are for you and your pet. Please be aware that it may be eight to ten weeks before an appointment is available.

We know saying goodbye to your pet is never easy. RASKC offers end-of-life services to pet owners within our jurisdiction. If your pet is licensed with King County, there is no charge for euthanasia services. For unlicensed pets, there is a $50 fee.

Whether we are able to accept more than one animal at a time may depend on the space we have available at that time. Please complete the Owner Surrender Form to receive a call from an intake specialist who can talk to you about your options.

If your pet has a litter of babies and you are able to rehome them on your own, we encourage you to review the above resources for rehoming. If you do decide to rehome on your own, you can find low cost spay and neuter locations through the ASPCA website.

If you are not able to rehome on your own, you are welcome to bring your litter to RASKC. Please complete the Owner Surrender Form and a RASKC representative will contact you.

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Euthanasia is the practice of ending the life of a patient to limit the patients suffering. The patient in question would typically be terminally ill or experiencing great pain and suffering.

The word euthanasia itself comes from the Greek words eu (good) and thanatos (death). The idea is that instead of condemning someone to a slow, painful, or undignified death, euthanasia would allow the patient to experience a relatively good death.

Different practices fall under the label euthanasia. Here are some distinctions demarcating different versions.

Active euthanasia: killing a patient by active means, for example, injecting a patient with a lethal dose of a drug. Sometimes called aggressive euthanasia.

Passive euthanasia: intentionally letting a patient die by withholding artificial life support such as a ventilator or feeding tube. Some ethicists distinguish betweenwithholdinglife support andwithdrawinglife support (the patient is on life support but then removed from it).

Voluntary euthanasia: with the consent of the patient.

Involuntary euthanasia: without the consent of the patient, for example, if the patient is unconscious and his or her wishes are unknown.. Some ethicists distinguish between involuntary (against the patients wishes) and nonvoluntary (without the patients consent but wishes are unknown) forms.

Self-administered euthanasia: the patient administers the means of death.

Other-administered euthanasia: a person other than the patient administers the means of death.

Assisted: the patient administers the means of death but with the assistance of another person, such as a physician.

There are many possible combinations of the above types, and many types of euthanasia are morally controversial. Some types of euthanasia, such as assisted voluntary forms, are legal in some countries.

Mercy-killing:The term mercy-killing usually refers to active, involuntary or nonvoluntary, other-administered euthanasia. In other words, someone kills a patient without their explicit consent to end the patients suffering. Some ethicists think that

Physician-assisted suicide:The phrase physician-assisted suicide refers to active, voluntary, assisted euthanasia where a physician assists the patient. A physician provides the patient with a means, such as sufficient medication, for the patient to kill him or herself.

Some instances of euthanasia are relatively uncontroversial. Killing a patient against their will (involuntary, aggressive/active, other-administered), for instance, is almost universally condemned. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, in Germany, Adolf Hitler carried out a program to exterminate children with disabilities (with or without their parents permission) under the guise of improving the Aryan race and reducing costs to society. Everyone now thinks this kind of euthanasia in the service of a eugenics program was clearly morally wrong.

Advocates of active euthanasia typically argue that killing the patients in question is not worse than letting them die. Advocates of voluntary euthanasia often claim that patients should have the right to do what they want with their own lives. Advocates of mercy killing argue that for patients who are in vegetative states with no prospect of recovery, letting them die prevents future needless and futile treatment efforts. If they are suffering then killing them prevents further suffering. Advocates of physician-assisted suicide argue that a physician assisting a terminally ill or suffering patient is merely helping the patient who wishes to die with dignity.

Critics of the euthanasia typically argue that killing is always wrong, that nonvoluntary or involuntary euthanasia violates patient rights, or that physician-assisted suicide violates an obligation to do no harm.

Killing vs. letting die: There is dispute over whether killing a patient is really any worse than letting the patient die if both result in the same outcome.

Commonsense morality usually thinks that letting a person die is not as bad as killing a person. We sometimes condemn letting an innocent person die and sometimes not, but we always condemn killing an innocent person.

Consider different instances of letting die. One might claim that it is wrong to let our neighbor die of an accident if we could easily have saved his or her life by calling an ambulance. On the other hand, we let starving people in poor countries die without condemning ourselves for failing to save them, because we think they have no right to demand we prevent their deaths. But if someone killed a neighbor or starving people we would think that wrong.

Likewise, we would condemn a healthcare professional who kills a patient. But we might accept the healthcare professional who at patient and family request withholds artificial life support to allow a suffering, terminally ill patient to die.

The distinction between killing and letting die is controversial in healthcare because critics charge there is no proper moral basis for the distinction. They say that killing the above patient brings about the same end as letting the patient die. Others object to this and claim that the nature of the act of killing is different than letting die in ways that make it morally wrong.

Ordinary vs. extraordinary treatment: Ordinary medical treatment includes stopping bleeding, administering pain killers and antibiotics, and setting fractures. But using a mechanical ventilator to keep a patient breathing is sometimes considered extraordinary treatment or care. Some ethicists believe letting a patient die by withholding or withdrawing artificial treatment or care is acceptable but withholding or withdrawing ordinary treatment or care is not. This view is controversial. Some claim the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary treatment is artificial, contrived, vague, or constantly changing as technology progresses

Death intended vs. anticipated: Some ethicists believe that if a suffering, terminally-ill patient dies because of intentionally receiving pain-relieving medications, it makes a difference whether the death itself was intended or merely anticipated. If the death was intended it is wrong but if the death was anticipated it might be morally acceptable. This reasoning relies on the moral principle called the principle of double effect.

Excerpt from:

Euthanasia - MU School of Medicine

Opinion 1.1.1

At the heart of medicine lie relationships founded in a covenant of trust between patient and physician in which physicians commit themselves to responding to the needs and promoting the welfare of patients.

Preserving opportunity for physicians to act (or to refrain from acting) in accordance with the dictates of conscience is important for preserving the integrity of the medical profession as well as the integrity of the individual physician; Physicians freedom to act according to conscience is not unlimited; They are expected to provide care in emergencies, honor patients informed decisions to refuse life-sustaining treatment, respect basic civil liberties and not discriminate against patients on the basis of arbitrary characteristics.

Informed consent to medical treatment is fundamental in both ethics and law. Patients have the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that they can make well-considered decisions about care.

Physicians should engage patients whose capacity is impaired in decisions involving their own care to the greatest extent possible, including when the patient has previously designated a surrogate to make decisions on his or her behalf.

When a terminally ill patient experiences severe pain or other distressing clinical symptoms that do not respond to aggressive, symptom-specific palliation, it can be appropriate to offer sedation to unconsciousness as an intervention of last resort.

Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physicians role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks. Instead of engaging in assisted suicide, physicians must respond to the needs of patients at the end of life.

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Euthanasia | ama-coe - American Medical Association

Euthanasia (good death) is the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relievepainandsuffering. It is also known as mercy killing. In many countries,there is a divisive public controversy over the moral, ethical, and legal issues of euthanasia.Euthanasia is categorized in different ways, which include voluntary, non-voluntary, or involuntary. Euthanasia is also classified into active and passive Euthanasia.

Voluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia can all be further divided into passive or active variants.

Historically, the euthanasia debate has tended to focus on a number of key concerns. According to euthanasia opponent Ezekiel Emanuel, proponents of euthanasia have presented four main arguments:

Emanuel argues that there are four major arguments presented by opponents of euthanasia:

Passive euthanasia is legal in India. On 7 March 2011, the Supreme Court of India legalised passive euthanasia by means of the withdrawal of life support to patients in a permanent vegetative state. The decision was made as part of the verdict in a case involving Aruna Shanbaug, who had been in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) for 42 years until her death in 2015.

In March 2011, the Supreme Court of India passed a historic judgement-law permitting Passive Euthanasia in the country. This judgment was passed in the wake of Pinki Viranis plea to the highest court in December 2009 under the Constitutional provision of Next Friend. Its a landmark law which places the power of choice in the hands of the individual, over government, medical or religious control which sees all suffering as destiny. The Supreme Court specified two irreversible conditions to permit Passive Euthanasia Law in its 2011 Law:

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The same judgement-law also asked for the scrapping of 309, the code which penalises those who survive suicide-attempts. In December 2014, the Government of India declared its intention to do so.

However on 25 February 2014, a three-judge bench of Supreme Court of India had termed the judgment in the Aruna Shanbaug case to be inconsistent in itself and has referred the issue of euthanasia to its five-judge Constitution bench on a PIL filed by Common Cause, which case is the basis of the current debate. Then, the CJI referred to an earlier Constitution Bench judgment which, in the Gian Kaur case, did not express any binding view on the subject of euthanasia; rather it reiterated that the legislature would be the appropriate authority to bring change. Though that judgment said the right to live with dignity under Article 21 was inclusive of the right to die with dignity, it did not arrive at a conclusion on the validity of euthanasia, be it active or passive. So, the only judgment that holds the field with regard to euthanasia in India is the ruling in the Aruna Shanbaug case, which upholds the validity of passive euthanasia and lays down an elaborate procedure for executing the same on the wrong premise that the Constitution Bench in Gian Kaur had upheld the same, the CJI said.

OnDecember 23, 2014, Government of India endorsed and re-validated the Passive Euthanasia judgement-law in a Press Release, after stating in the Rajya Sabha as follows: that The Honble Supreme Court of India, while dismissing the plea for mercy killing in a particular case, laid down comprehensive guidelines to process cases relating to passive euthanasia. Thereafter, the matter of mercy killing was examined in consultation with the Ministry of Law and Justice and it has been decided that since the Honble Supreme Court has already laid down the guidelines, these should be followed and treated as law in such cases. At present, there is no legislation on this subject and the judgment of the Honble Supreme Court is binding on all.

The court rejected active euthanasia by means of lethal injection. In the absence of a law regulating euthanasia in India, the court stated that its decision becomes the law of the land until the Indian parliament enacts a suitable law. Active euthanasia, including the administration of lethal compounds for the purpose of ending life, is still illegal in India, and in most countries.

As India had no law about euthanasia, the Supreme Courts guidelines are law until and unless Parliament passes legislation. The following guidelines were laid down:

Recently, the issue was in the news, as the Govt. said it was open to making a law on the subject. The law commission too has proposed a legislation on passive euthanasia, it said. According to the Centre, the decision to come out with a bill was taken after considering the directives of the apex court, the law commissions 241st report and a private member bill introduced in Parliament in 2014. The Centre said that initially, a meeting was held under the chairmanship of B.P. Sharma, secretary in the health and family welfare ministry, on May 22, 2015, to examine the draft of The Medical Treatment of Terminally Ill Patients (Protection of Patients and Medical Practitioners) Bill and the draft of The Euthanasia (Regulation) Bill.

This move to introduce a bill is a welcome step to clear the grey areas in Euthanasia debate.Students can also link to this issue while answering questions on:

Article by: Jishnu J Raju

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Euthanasia - Arguments in Favour and Against - ClearIAS

Baton Rouge animal shelter overwhelmed, resorting to euthanasia: 'Please help us help them'  The Advocate

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Baton Rouge animal shelter overwhelmed, resorting to euthanasia: 'Please help us help them' - The Advocate

1. Canadian religious leaders speak out as country set to allow euthanasia for mental illness  Fox News
2. Protect life until the end, archbishop tells health workers  The Catholic Register
3. Death on Demand | Gene Veith  Patheos
4. Health workers called to love, and possibly conscientious objection, archbishop says  The B.C. Catholic
5. Renu Bakshi: Calm before the storm upcoming death laws test Canadas woke values  Business in Vancouver
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Canadian religious leaders speak out as country set to allow euthanasia for mental illness - Fox News

The idea that death should be merciful is not new. When a person is gravely wounded or terminally ill, when death is inevitable, and the suffering is so great that living no longer brings any joy to the person, it is understandable that he or she may wish to die. In Two Pioneers of Euthanasia Around 1800, Michael Stolberg cites accounts of people pulling on the legs of those who had been hanged, but had not yet died, to hasten their deaths. He mentions also Apologie, the autobiography of a French surgeon named Ambroise Par who happened upon three gravely wounded soldiers. An uninjured soldier asked the surgeon if they would live, to which he responded they would not. The uninjured soldier proceeded to slit their throats.

The invention and widespread use of morphine in the 19th century to treat, and then to kill, pain led to the belief that a less painful dying process was possible, Giza Lopes writes in her book Dying With Dignity: A Legal Approach to Assisted Death. In the mid-19th century, surgeons began using chloroform, which had fewer negative side effects than morphine, and which knocked people unconscious. In 1885, the American Medical Association officially opposed voluntary euthanasia. Though some doctors believed in the redemptive nature of suffering, the opposition was not overwhelming enough to stop the movement. The ability to relieve pain experienced as the result of surgical procedures, childbirth, or mere living, logically led to conversations about death and dying. Medications could alleviate end-of-life suffering and expedite death.

Doctors and ethicists from both the United States and England hashed out their thoughts on euthanasia in medical journals.

As time and technology progressed, everyday people came to see physicians as godlike figures, and, Lopes writes, doctors claimed a role in the process of dying. Through the early 20th century, opiates were still widely available, but physicians had begun to take control of prescribing and administering other medications.

On January 23, 1906, the Ohio legislature introduced a euthanasia bill. A Cincinnati woman named Anna Hall had lobbied hard to legalize euthanasia, hoping to hasten the death of her mother, who was suffering from a terminal and painful illness. That same year, Dr. R. H. Gregory introduced a similar bill to the Iowa state legislature. These two have been dubbed the chloroform bills.

Doctors and ethicists from both the United States and England hashed out their thoughts on euthanasia in medical journals, and the movements in both countries evolved in tandem. When Dr. Gregory proposed the Iowa euthanasia bill, the British Medical Journal responded, tearing into him:

That the man is either a crank of a particularly noxious type or a mere-notoriety hunter, is clear enough from the statement attributed to him that he simply wishes to make lawful that which is already daily practised by the greatest physicians and surgeons in every large hospital in the United States. If Dr. Gregory really believes this, he is more credulous than the simplest gobe-mouche who swallows without straining the platform facts of antivivisection and antivaccination; if he does not believe it, he is a liar of the basest kind.

A few years later, in 1911, a woman named Sadie Marchant, who was living in a Shaker colony and struggling to breathe with a single functioning lung for years, asked for help dying. The Shakers with whom shed been living prayed and decided finally that helping her die would be the right thing to do. Two of the Shakers were arrested. Their case was ultimately dismissed in January 1912, Lopes writes in Dying With Dignity. The case was well covered by newspapers across the country including the Washington Times and the New York Times. The dismissal of charges helped cement the idea of euthanasia as merciful in the case of terminal illness and grave suffering.

In 1935, the euthanasia movement got going in earnest in England when the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalization Society was founded. It held its inaugural meeting that year, and the societys founder, C. Killick Millard, wrote to the British Medical Journal that he hoped the British Medical Association, which had not offered an opinion one way or another, would not offer an opinion. The decision to die, the author continued, was not a medical one.

A bill was introduced to Britains House of Lords in 1936 that would allow anyone over 21 years old who was mentally competent and fatally ill, or sick with an incurable disease, and suffering from immense pain to request voluntary euthanasia. The person would have to have two witnesses and be seen by several doctors, and then apply to the Minister of Health, who would then have to interview the dying person. That bills requirements are nearly identical to the ones that are now law today in several U.S. states. With 35 to 14 votes, the bill was defeated.

In 1957, the Vatican proclaimed that passive euthanasia was acceptable.

In 1957, the Vatican proclaimed that passive euthanasia was acceptable, according to Thomas R. Coles review of A Merciful End. Passive euthanasia is the deliberate decision to withhold lifesaving measures, like a ventilator, knowing that death will result. Hoping to take advantage of the change in public opinion after the Popes declaration, assisted-suicide advocates pivoted to focus on legalizing passive euthanasia.

Fast-forward four decades to 1994, when Oregon became the first state to legalize aid in dying. The law was immediately challenged, Lee v. State of Oregon. The case made its way through the court system for the next three years, and in February 1997, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lower courts ruling against the Oregon Death with Dignity Act. The law went into effect in 1997.

Around the same time, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was traveling across the country with his death machine, making the cover of Time and stirring up conversation about end-of-life choices. District attorneys brought criminal charges against Kevorkian for ending peoples lives several times, but he was convicted only once. Kevorkian had filmed himself giving a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) life-ending medication. He then gave the tape to Mike Wallace, host of 60 Minutes. Wallace aired the tape on TV alongside an interview with Kevorkian. In the tape, after the man dies, Kevorkian challenges the district attorney to take him to court. Reluctantly, the DA did, and this time Dr. Death lost. Kevorkian was sentenced to between 10 and 25 years in prison, the New York Times reported in his obituary. He was released in June 2007, after promising hed never help in another suicide. He died in 2011.

* * *Today, anyone choosing to die under the law in states where physician aid is legal, like Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana, and California, must be able to self-administer the life-ending medication. If the patient cannot, then he or she is ineligible, which means that most people suffering from neuromuscular diseases like ALS and Parkinsons will not be able to ease their pain legally. By the time people with these diseases are within six months of death, more often than not, they cannot self-administer.

That said, some doctors are still willing to help patients die, whether legally or illegally. In non-Catholic hospices, palliative sedationlike the so-called passive euthanasia of yoreis one way doctors help their patients hasten death. The doctrine of double effect safeguards doctors whose good-faith actions result in the death of their patients. If the doctor can make the case that he or she administered medicine without knowing or not believing it would result in a patients death, the doctrine protects them.

As medical technology gets better and better, death can become more prolonged and more difficult. A heart attack that once might have killed a person can now serve as a wakeup call. Ventilators keep people breathing far beyond when their bodies would have died naturally. Death does not come as it used to. While some people might welcome more days, regardless of their pain or diminished physical state, others do not. Policy and medical ethics have not kept up with technology.

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The History of the Euthanasia Movement | JSTORY Daily

1. How Canada became a world leader in euthanasia  Spiked
2. Euthanasia is liberalisms endpoint | Henry George  The Critic
3. Brian Bird: Canada seems on a road that ends with permitting euthanasia for any reason  Vancouver Sun
4. Canada Euthanized 10,000 People in 2021. Has Death Lost Its Sting?  ChristianityToday.com
5. John Ivison: Medically assisted death is slipping down a dreadful slope  National Post
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Originally posted here:

How Canada became a world leader in euthanasia - Spiked

The Victorian Parliament will consider a bill to legalise euthanasia in the second half of 2017. That follows the South Australian Parliaments decision to knock back a voluntary euthanasia bill late last year, and the issue has also cropped up in the run-up to the March 11 Western Australian election.

With the issue back in the headlines, federal Labors justice spokesperson, Clare O'Neil, told Q&A that in countries where the practice is legal, very, very small numbers of people use the laws.

Whether or not you agree with O'Neils statement depends largely on your interpretation of the subjective term very, very small, but there is a growing body of data available on how many people are using euthanasia or assisted dying laws in places such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Colombia, Canada and some US states.

Many people use the terms assisted dying, assisted suicide and euthanasia interchangeably. But, technically, these phrases can have different meanings.

Assisted dying (sometimes also assisted death) is where the patient himself or herself ultimately takes the medication. Euthanasia, by contrast, is usually where the doctor administers the medication to the patient.

Assisted suicide includes people who are not terminally ill, but who are being helped to commit suicide, whereas assisted dying refers to people who are already dying. Some reports do not, however, distinguish between assisted dying and assisted suicide, and I will not distinguish them here.

In some jurisdictions, the word euthanasia is used to refer to both assisted dying/suicide (where the patient himself or herself takes the medication) and to euthanasia (where the doctor administers the medication to the patient). So euthanasia can sometimes be used as a broad term to cover a range of actions.

According to a peer-reviewed paper published last year in the respected journal JAMA:

Between 0.3% to 4.6% of all deaths are reported as euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in jurisdictions where they are legal. The frequency of these deaths increased after legalization Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are increasingly being legalized, remain relatively rare, and primarily involve patients with cancer. Existing data do not indicate widespread abuse of these practices.

The authors of that paper said that 35,598 people died in Oregon in 2015. Of these deaths, 132, or 0.39%, were reported as physician-assisted suicides. The same paper said that in Washington in 2015 there were 166 reported cases of physician-assisted suicide (equating to 0.32% of all deaths in Washington in that year).

Interestingly, the same paper noted that US data show that:

pain is not the main motivation for PAS (physician-assisted suicide) The dominant motives are loss of autonomy and dignity and being less able to enjoy lifes activities.

The authors said that in officially reported Belgian cases, pain was the reason for euthanasia in about half of cases. Loss of dignity is mentioned as a reason for 61% of cases in the Netherlands and 52% in Belgium.

A 2016 Victorian parliamentary report has quoted from the UK Commission on Assisted Dying, which in turn referenced the work of John Griffiths, Heleen Weyers and Maurice Adams in their book Euthanasia and Law in Europe. The commission said:

There are no official data in Switzerland on the numbers of assisted suicides that take place each year, as the rate of assisted suicide is not collected centrally. Griffiths et al observe that there are approximately 62,000 deaths in Switzerland each year and academic studies suggest that between 0.3% and 0.4% of these are assisted suicides. This figure increases to 0.5% of all deaths if suicide tourism is included (assisted suicides that involve nonSwiss nationals).

Around 3.7% of deaths in the Netherlands in 2015 were due to euthanasia. The Netherlands regional euthanasia review committees reported that there were 5,516 deaths due to euthanasia in 2015. That is out of a total of around 147,000 - 148,000 deaths in the Netherlands that year.

This figure represents an increase of 4% of deaths due to euthanasia compared to 2014.

A 2012 paper published in The Lancet reported on the results of nationwide surveys on euthanasia in the Netherlands in 1995, 2001, 2005 and 2010. The researchers said:

In 2002, the euthanasia act came into effect in the Netherlands, which was followed by a slight decrease in the euthanasia frequency In 2010, of all deaths in the Netherlands, 2.8% were the result of euthanasia. This rate is higher than the 1.7% in 2005, but comparable with those in 2001 and 1995.

Another Netherlands-based study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine reported in 2015 that:

Certainly, not all requests are granted; studies conducted between 1990 and 2011 report rates of granting requests between 32% and 45%.

A 2015 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about euthanasia rates in the Flanders region of Belgium (the northern half of the country) noted:

The rate of euthanasia increased significantly between 2007 and 2013, from 1.9% to 4.6% of deaths.

It can be hard to put these rates in context, but what is clear is that euthanasia is by no means a leading cause of death in countries where it is legal. For example, Statistics Belgium said that for the year 2012, cardiovascular disease was the most common cause of death (28.8%), and cancer was the second most common cause of death (26%).

And in the Netherlands where 5,516 of deaths were due to euthanasia in 2015 more than 12,000 Dutch people died from the effects of dementia in 2014, approximately 10,000 Dutch people died from lung cancer and nearly 9,000 died from a heart attack. In 2013, 30% (about 42,000) of Dutch deaths were from cancer and 27% (about 38,000) of Dutch deaths were from cardiovascular disease.

If this article has raised issues for you or if youre concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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In places where it's legal, how many people are ending their lives ...

Euthanasia, or voluntary assisted suicide, has been the subject of much moral, religious, philosophical, legal and human rights debate in Australia. At the core of this debate is how to reconcile competing values: the desire of individuals to choose to die with dignity when suffering, and the need to uphold the inherent right to life of every person, as recognised by article 6(1) of the ICCPR.

Several legislative attempts have been made to legalise euthanasia in parts of Australia. However, at present, it remains unlawful.

One of these attempts was the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (NT), which allowed for medically assisted voluntary euthanasia at the request of a terminally ill person. This Act is discussed in Human Rights and Euthanasia, an occasional paper which examines the relationship between euthanasia and international human rights law (see below). Shortly after this paper was published, the federal Parliament made Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (NT) inoperative by amending the Federal Parliament of the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 (Cth).

The Australian Human Rights Commission does not have any current projects on euthanasia and human rights.

This issues paper explores voluntary euthanasia. It is not intended to be exhaustive, however it aims to add to considerations of this very complex and sensitive topic through analysis of the domestic regulatory environment relating to both passive and active forms of voluntary euthanasia, and of relevant international laws by way of comparison with domestic regulation. It concludes with a human rights-based analysis of voluntary euthanasia and some commentary on the practice informed by human rights principles.

To read the 2016 report click here

In 1996, the Human Rights Unit released Human Rights and Euthanasia, a paper which seeks to promote informed public discussion of issues surrounding the legal regulation of euthanasia and in particular the relevance of international human rights norms to that debate. The paper reflects the state of law and policy as at December 1996.

The position of international human rights law with respect to voluntary euthanasia is not explicit or clearly defined. Article 6(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides: Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.

The impact of article 6(1) on voluntary euthanasia raises a number of questions including the scope of the right to life, the interpretation of 'arbitrary' deprivation of life and the definition of life and in particular when life ends.

For complete report, download PDF (111K), Word (121K)

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Human Rights and Euthanasia