This is an opinion article. The views expressed belong to the author.
Imagine being asked to sit down with a blank page and write the constitution of a country. What would you protect first?
Before taxation, elections or the organisation of political power, there is a more fundamental question: what is the first thing a society owes to a human being simply because he or she is human?
Freedom comes quickly to mind. Equality. Dignity. Security.
But all of them contain an assumption so obvious that we stop to examine it: there must first be a life to whom those rights belong.
Life is, in that sense, a peculiar right. Freedom of expression is something we exercise. Privacy is something we enjoy. Property is something we possess.
Life is different. It is the condition that makes exercising, enjoying or possessing anything possible at all.
Perhaps that is why the modern human-rights tradition places it so close to the beginning.
After the catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights moved almost immediately from human dignity and equality to the declaration that "everyone has the right to life".
In Europe, the European Convention placed the protection of life in Article 2, and the Council of Europe describes it as one of its most important rights precisely because the enjoyment of every other right depends upon it.
And this is not an unusual constitutional instinct. The United Nations has observed that the right to life appears in most constitutions around the world.
But the philosophical question goes further than legal texts. What makes a human life worthy of protection? Is it consciousness? Independence? The ability to express a preference? Being wanted by somebody? Being useful to society? Or simply being human?
Most of us instinctively resist those answers, because human existence repeatedly passes through periods in which none of them can be guaranteed.
A newborn possesses almost no autonomy. A person under anaesthesia cannot express a wish. Disabilities may create lifelong dependence. Dementia may gradually take away capacities that once seemed inseparable from the person we knew.
And yet we do not normally say that their humanity has become proportionately smaller.
If human dignity really is inherent, rather than earned, then vulnerability cannot be what disqualifies somebody from protection. On the contrary, vulnerability may be the moment when the principle is most seriously tested.
There is an interesting contrast. A petition concerning access to pepper spray, launched on exactly the same day, has rapidly gathered signatures, while petition 4251 and the constitutional question it raises about the right to life has progressed far more slowly.
It is against that background that Luxembourg's constitutional silence on the right to life becomes an interesting question. One of the most widespread foundations of modern human-rights thinking remains unstated in our own constitution. And now, through petition 4251, that question has been placed before Luxembourg again.
Does or should our society consider it fundamental to give protection to the right to life even when the person concerned has no voice, no strength and no power?
