Contents - Constitutional Court of Georgia

The European Courtof Human Rights is Fifty. Recent trends in the Court’s jurisprudence
ing the reasons given by the Chamber in its judgment of 7 March 2006, “the Grand Chamber
finds that the embryos (…) do not have a right to life within the meaning of Article 2,
and that there has not, therefore, been a violation of that provision” 33 . This case also raised
the question of consent to artificial insemination: “the Court finds that, in adopting in the
1990 Act a clear and principled rule, which was explained to the parties and clearly set out
in the forms they both signed, whereby the consent of either party might be withdrawn at
any stage up to the point of implantation of an embryo, the United Kingdom did not exceed
the margin of appreciation afforded to it or upset the fair balance required under Article 8
of the Convention” 34 .
The issue of the adequacy of the legal system in protecting the foetus which had been
destroyed as a result of negligence by a doctor, was examined by the Court in the case
of Vo v. France 35 , the Court noting the sensitive problem of weighing up the various, and
sometimes conflicting, rights and freedoms claimed by a woman, a mother or a father in
relation to one another and vis-à-vis an unborn child.
In the case of Tyşiac v. Poland, it was the procedural guarantees offered to a woman
seeking to enforce her right to a therapeutic abortion under domestic law which were at
the heart of the case 36 .
Article 3. Prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment
We know the strength of this provision is that it can produce the knock-on effect (“un
effet par ricochet”) of incorporating some other fields into the Convention. So this right
may be used, indirectly, to deal with situations in which, with the turning away of people in
despair (for instance, aliens), human dignity is at stake.
First of all, the new Court, at its very beginning, sent out a strong message. In the Selmouni
v. France judgment of 28 July 1999, in the context of a torture complaint involving the
police, the Court emphasised that: “certain acts which were classified in the past as ‘inhuman
and degrading treatment’ as opposed to ‘torture’ could be classified differently in
future. It takes the view that the increasingly high standard being required in the area of
the protection of human rights and fundamental liberties correspondingly and inevitably
requires greater firmness in assessing breaches of the fundamental values of democratic
societies” 37 .
33 ECtHR (GC), Evans v. the United Kingdom, judgment of 10 April 2007, § 56.
34 ECtHR, Evans v. the United Kingdom, judgment of 7 March 2006, § 69.
35 ECtHR (GC), Vo v. France, judgment of 8 July 2004.
36 ECtHR, Tyşiac v. Poland, judgment of 20 March 2007.
37 ECtHR (GC), Selmouni v. France, judgment of 28 July 1999, § 101.
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