The Legal Nature of the Right to Life. The Consequences of Voluntary Interference with Life

The legal nature of the right to life is a fundamental aspect of any discussion regarding the exercitation of this right by any human being. Therefore the State must respect a person’s right to life, if this right has a correlation in the person’s right to choose death can only be explained juridically by determining first the legal nature of the right to life. The thesis this article argues for is that the right to life contains two elements: a personal right to life, which appears as soon as a person is conceived, and a detached right to life, which belongs to society in general beginning with the moment when the foetus is viable. The first element which forms the right to life ceases at the moment when the person dies, while, sometimes, the detached right ceases or appears as a diminished social interest beginning with a moment anterior to death. Under these conditions, the legal nature of the right to life is situated during most of a person’s life at the confluence of the notions right and liberty. The paper argues for that, in principle, the right to life is not a liberty, therefore one cannot give it up in a valid way. However, in certain situations, the detached right to life may be diminished to such an extent that the right to life can pass as a liberty, composed in fact of the personal and subjective right to live which anyone may give up in a valid way. Consequently, as regards the voluntary interference with the right to life, the state cannot be obliged to give assistance to suicide, but it can be compelled to accept the impunity of euthanasia in certain conditions analyzed in the study.

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