Dignity, Autonomy and the End of Life

In one line

Article 21 protects life, and the question this chapter answers is whether a right to life can include a right to decide how it is lived and how it ends; the answer is that it protects choices about how you live, and dignity at the end of life, but not a right to shorten life itself.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in Gian Kaur v. State of Punjab a Constitution Bench held that "'Right to life' is a natural right embodied in article 21 but suicide is an unnatural termination or extinction of life and, therefore, incompatible and inconsistent with the concept of 'right to life'", and that "the 'right to die', if any, is inherently inconsistent with the 'right to life' as is 'death' with 'life'". But it also held that the right to live with human dignity "would mean the existence of such a right upto the end of natural life", including "the right to a dignified life upto the point of death including a dignified procedure of death". In Common Cause a Constitution Bench built on that to recognise passive euthanasia and the advance directive. In Navtej Singh Johar the Court held section 377 of the Penal Code unconstitutional so far as it criminalises consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex.

Why the law has this at all

Once "life" means life with dignity, as [The Expansion of "Life"] establishes, a second question follows immediately and the Constitution does not answer it. If the right is to a dignified life, who decides what is dignified?

Two answers are possible. The State decides, applying a public standard of what a good life is. Or the individual decides, and the right becomes a right of self-determination. Article 21 is silent, and almost every hard question in this chapter is a version of that choice: whether a person may end his own life, whether a dying person may refuse treatment, whom he may love.

The Court's position, worked out over twenty-two years, is that the individual decides how to live, and that the State may not criminalise that choice merely because a majority disapproves of it; but that the right does not extend to extinguishing life itself, because a right cannot include its own destruction.

The right to life does not include a right to die

Facts. Smt. Gian Kaur v. State of Punjab, 1996 AIR 946, (1996) 2 SCC 648, decided 21 March 1996 by a Constitution Bench. The appellants were convicted under section 306 of the Indian Penal Code for abetting a suicide. They argued that since P. Rathinam had held section 309, which punished attempted suicide, unconstitutional on the footing that article 21 includes a "right to die", a person who assists a suicide is merely assisting the enforcement of a fundamental right, so section 306 must also be void.