10 Judgements That Changed India

by Zia Mody

Because this is an area where questions of law grapple with moral and ethical values unlike any other.

What is the difference between euthanasia and suicide? This is tough to answer because the two concepts are very closely interlinked and the dividing line between them is very thin. Euthanasia denotes causing the death of incurable or terminally-ill patients; and the meaning of suicide is universally known. It is hard to imagine a legal system where the relatives of a patient in a vegetative state can decide to end his life while a fully competent adult is not allowed to end his own.

A person who attempts suicide, whether due to mental disorder or physical ailment, needs treatment and care more than imprisonment.

The court concluded that the constitutional right to live includes the ‘right not to live’ or the right to end one’s life.10 The Bombay High Court held that Section 309 was ultra vires or ‘beyond the powers’ of the Constitution and struck it down. All prosecutions instituted against the petitioner under Section 309 were quashed.

Is it constitutionally permissible to penalize suicide? This question arose in the Supreme Court in P. Rathinam v. Union of India12 (Rathinam). Hearing the writ petition challenging the constitutional validity of Section 309, the court rightly held that an attempt to commit suicide indicated a psychological problem rather than any criminal instinct. After weighing every possible legal and moral implication of treating a suicide attempt as a criminal offence, the court struck down Section 309 of the IPC as being void and ineffectual. In fact, the court held that Section 309 contravened the right to life under Article 21.

However, the right to die with dignity was not to be confused with the right to die an unnatural death, one which cut short the natural span of life. In the cases of persons who were terminally ill or in a vegetative state, the process of natural death had already commenced, and so it was possible to reason that accelerating that process would be consistent

The court distinguished between two forms of euthanasia: active and passive. ‘Active euthanasia’ denotes the use of lethal substances to end a person’s life, while ‘passive euthanasia’ entails the withholding of any medical treatment (such as life-saving antibiotics) that would ensure the survival of a patient. The difference between the two is that in case of active euthanasia the procedure that causes death would have caused the death of any person, regardless of the person’s physical condition (for instance, the use of a lethal injection). This is not so in the case of passive euthanasia. In several countries, such as Ireland, passive euthanasia is permitted whereas active euthanasia is prohibited.

declared passive euthanasia as permissible (or, at least, not illegal), using the rationale that ‘failing to save a person’ could never constitute a crime.

On the other hand, it confirmed that active euthanasia—because it involves a deliberate act by a third party, usually a doctor—would be tantamount to murder since death is caused by a positive ‘action’ rather than a mere ‘omission to act’. The