The Supreme Court is set to hear an appeal against a ruling by the High Court in January which upheld Ireland’s ban on assisted suicide.

Marie Fleming, who lost the case, argued that the ban infringed her personal autonomy and equality rights under the Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights, the Irish Times reports.

However a three-judge High Court ruled in early January that the ban was justified to protect vulnerable others from involuntary death and did not infringe on Ms Fleming’s rights.

Ms Fleming, a 59-year-old former lecturer living in Co Wicklow, had asked the court for orders allowing her be lawfully helped take her own life at a time of her choosing.

She argued that the blanket ban on assisted suicide in Section 2.2 of the Criminal Law Suicide Act 1993 breached her personal rights under the Constitution and ECHR.

Lawyers for the State argued that while suicide was no longer a criminal act, there was no constitutional right to take your own life.

The State was entitled to maintain the ban, as a matter of social policy to protect others. Doctors who gave evidence for the State said they believed the removal of the ban would be the slippery slope towards involuntary euthanasia.

The court held that there was “real risk”, even with rigorous safeguards, that it “would be impossible to ensure that the aged, the disabled, the poor, the unwanted, the rejected, the lonely, the impulsive, the financially compromised and emotionally vulnerable would not avail of option in order to avoid a sense of being a burden on their family and society”, if the ban was removed.

The court also found the Director of Public Prosecutions could not issue guidelines setting out what facts she would consider in deciding whether to prosecute cases of assisted suicide.

Only the Oireachtas can change the law and it would be unconstitutional for the DPP to effect a change in the law by issuing guidelines which would have the effect of the law not being enforced, it said.

However, it added, if there was “reliable” evidence after an assisted suicide of compliance with guidelines such as those set out by the UK DPP in relation to assisted suicide prosecutions, the court said it believed the DPP here would excerise her discretion “in this of all cases” in a “a humane and sensitive fashion”.