Surprise Ruling: EU Court of Human Rights Upholds Italy's Ban on Embryo Research

Jeanne Smits : Sep 16, 2015
LifeSiteNews.com

"The right to life is absolute, and this fundamental tenet makes it unnecessary to explain why a murderer, a disabled person, an abandoned child or an embryo should be kept alive. We do not need to evaluate their usefulness for society, but we remain hopeful regarding their potential. The embryo's right to life cannot be called into question by the fact that, until implantation, its potential for development is something that can be maintained artificially, because any such new technology is a natural development created by human beings." –Judge Dedov

(European Union)—The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights recently affirmed Italy's right to protect human embryos as it sees fit, in a ruling that rejected an Italian woman's request that she be allowed to donate her cryogenically frozen embryos to scientific research. Adelina Parrillo was challenging a law passed in Italy in 2004 that prohibits research on human embryos, on the grounds that the law is "incompatible with her right to respect for her private life and her right to the peaceful enjoyment of her possessions," as guaranteed by the European Convention of Human Rights. (Photo: Building of the European Court of Human Rights/Shutterstock/via LifeSiteNews)

In other words, Parrillo was asking the Court to recognize that human embryos are objects, "possessions" whose owners may use them as they see fit.

In the context of widespread and often liberal abortion laws in many of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe who are party to the European Convention of Human Rights, a positive answer from the Court would not have been surprising, the more so because the European Union—whose 27 member states are also European Council members—embryo research in its own right. But the Grand Chamber, in a decision that cannot be appealed, stood firm—or nearly so. Sixteen of its seventeen judges upheld the research ban as imposed by Italy's Law n° 40/2004.

Adelina Parrillo, now in her early sixties, obtained the embryos through in vitro fertilization in 2002 together with her husband, a filmmaker who died in tragic circumstances during a bomb attack in Iraq in late 2003. At that time the embryos had not yet been implanted, and the widow decided not to go ahead with the medically assisted reproduction procedure. The frozen embryos were kept in the Rome fertility clinic where the in vitro fertilization took place and are still in storage there, in what Jérôme Lejeune, the great French pro-life geneticist, once called the "Concentration can" when witnessing in favor of the life of other frozen embryos in Maryland, Tennessee, back in 1989. (Photo: Embryonic stem-cell/via SBA-list.org)

But contrary to the Maryland case that involved a woman who wanted to obtain custody of her and her ex-husband's frozen embryos in order to give them a chance to live through implantation, Adelina Parrillo, who is now in her sixties, wanted her embryos offered up to a "noble cause," as she calls it: embryonic stem cell research. After a number of oral requests she formally presented a written demand, explaining that donating the five embryos would "be a source of comfort to her after the painful events that had occurred in her life," rather than destroying them or letting them die.

The clinic's director refused: since 2004, using embryos for research is considered a punishable offence in Italy. Parrillo immediately turned to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that any action before the ordinary courts in Italy was bound to fail because of the "blanket ban" on donating embryos to scientific research. The Court agreed that she would probably have found no "effective remedy" in the Italian judiciary system and agreed to examine the affair.

It also agreed that Parrillo rightly invoked article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights because "the applicant's ability to exercise a conscious and considered choice regarding the fate of her embryos concerns an intimate aspect of her personal life and accordingly relates to her right to self-determination." And not her "family life" which is also protected under article 8: Parrillo was most emphatically not pleading for her embryos to be implanted—a course which is not in any case open to widows under law 40/2004.

Click here to read more.