Tuesday’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the case of Gross v Switzerland was both astonishing and disturbing.

The court found that Switzerland’s law, which allows doctors to prescribe drugs to allow patients to kill themselves didn’t provide sufficient “clarity” and as such breached the plaintiff’s right to respect for private life.

Switzerland is one of only four countries that allows assisted suicide so for the court to effectively suggest that practice there too restrictive is remarkable and worrying.

It was astonishing because it flew in the face of a decision made only a couple of years by the same court in the case of Haas v Switzerland, in which it ruled that there was no right to assisted suicide under the European Convention on Human Rights and that there was no positive duty on States in this regard.

Now it is saying there is a duty to provide ‘clarity’.

However it was disturbing for another reason also.

When the ECHR ruled in the A, B and C v Ireland case, it never said that abortion was a right under the Convention.

Instead, it claimed, as in this case, that Ireland’s laws on the question needed to be “clarified”. 

The need for greater “clarity” was very quickly translated by our Government into a legal requirement to legalise abortion along the lines of the Supreme Court’s notorious 1992 X case ruling.

So instead of straightforwardly advocating for abortion and euthanasia, the Court appears to be using what could be called a “stealth” tactic, pursuing those goals by calling for greater “clarity” in these areas.

Greater clarity, in practice, seems to inevitably mean more liberalisation unless there is strong political resistance to same in a given country.

Hopefully Switzerland will appeal this decision and not be as gutless as our Government.