euthanasia outside legitimate health care

Ending a person's life outside the narrow legal process for assisted dying. It is illegal in every country, including the countries and states that allow assisted dying, and it is prosecuted as murder or manslaughter.

Why: where assisted dying is legal, as in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, and US states such as Oregon and Colorado, it is allowed only under strict medical law. The person must ask for it themselves, freely and more than once, while able to make the decision; they must meet medical criteria such as a terminal or serious incurable illness; independent clinicians must confirm this; and each case is recorded and reviewed. No law anywhere allows someone to decide that another person should die, to pressure or persuade them toward death, or to carry it out outside that process.

The right to life is protected in international human rights law (Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). After the Second World War, people who carried out the Nazi "euthanasia" program, which killed people with disabilities without their consent, were tried for murder and crimes against humanity.

Related terms: self-elected suicide, Nuremberg Code, crimes against humanity, euthanasia

Sources: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — OHCHR · The "euthanasia" program — US Holocaust Memorial Museum