Physician convicted of assisted suicide loses rights appeal

STRASBOURG, France (CN) — Denmark didn’t violate a doctor’s freedom of expression by jailing him for helping patients end their lives, Europe’s top rights court ruled Tuesday. 

The European Court of Human Rights sided with Copenhagen, finding that Svend Lings’ 2018 conviction for medically assisted suicide didn’t violate the European Convention on Human Rights. 

Lings, the former chief physician at Odense University Hospital in southern Denmark, was given a 40-day prison sentence in 2018, later increased to 60 days, for helping two people die and a third person attempt suicide. The 81-year-old, now-retired physician founded Læger for Aktiv Dødshjælp, or Physicians in Favour of Euthanasia, in 2015, which advocates for legalizing assisted suicide in Denmark. 

Following a 2017 radio interview, in which he described how his organization had helped at least 10 people take their own lives, his medical license was revoked and, after further investigation, he was ultimately charged for his involvement in three suicides or attempted suicides. 

Both euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal in Denmark, as well as several other European countries, but distributing information about suicide methods is not. Lings argued before the court in Denmark, as well as before the ECHR, that he had merely been disseminating information about suicide. After his final appeal failed before the Danish Supreme Court, he complained to the ECHR, arguing that under the right to expression, guaranteed by the convention which created the court in 1959, what he did should not be considered illegal. 

The seven-judge panel disagreed, writing that Lings “had not only provided guidance, but had also, by specific acts, procured medications for the persons concerned, in the knowledge that it was intended for their suicide.” It was clear, the court wrote, that he had gone beyond simply providing general information about suicide. 

“The people who come to me are in dire straits. They're having a terrible time. I feel morally obligated to help them,” Sings told TV 2/Fyn, a regional Danish broadcaster, following the ruling. He said that he does not understand the decision and that trying to understand the logic of it “gives him pain in the brain.” 

The ECHR has ruled on several end-of-life cases, including a landmark 2015 decision that said it would not violate the convention if the family of a man who had been in a vegetative state for nearly a decade went forward with removing life support. Later that year, the court refused to hear a case over the United Kingdom’s ban on physician-assisted suicide, saying the convention did not force states to allow it. 

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