The Constitutional Protection Of The Right To Life

Why does the right to life need the constitutional protection? Is the constitutional protection the right to life to put the right to life into the constitution and defend the encroachment from nations? How to put the right to life into effect? The aim of this thesis is to answer these questions completely.This thesis explores systematically the right to life, the meaning of the constitutional protection of the right to life, its history and present situation of constitutional protection for the right to life, the theoretical bases and nation's duty for constitutional protection for the right to life, and the realization of constitutional protection for the right to life through historical analysis, comparative analysis, systematic analysis, and substantial evidence analysis.The contents of the right to life include the life to existence, safety and self-decision, which is quite different from the right to subsistence consisting of the right to foods, the right to houses and the right to personal health. The constitutional protection for the right to life is not a common law protection. It is always based on the constitution, but not equal to constitutions. It needs constitution to guarantee its realization but differs from the constitutions.After studying the constitutions texts from different countries, it is found that the right to life has been put into the constitutions by 153 nations among whole 184 nations in the world. As more as 83 percent nations have put this right into their own constitutions, which has become a global trend of establishing constitutions.The dissertation holds that Life Divine Theory and Life Quality Theory are the ethics basis for the constitutional safeguard of the right to life, the thought of Natural Law and liberalism are the philosophical bases for the constitutional protection of the right to life, and the theory of public rights and the Priority Theory of Constitution are the constitutional bases for the constitutional protection of the right to life. The constitutional protection of the right to life has the unique value of supervising and inspecting whether the protection of the right to life by departmental law is against the constitution or not, which is the key to the constitutional protection of the right to life. The constitutional protection of the right to life has special necessity in our country.Traditional theory takes that the right to life is a kind of negative right of freedom and is used to confront the state, the obligation of the state is to respect negatively and not to violate the right. The dissertation says that, though in the category of the right to freedom, the constitution right to life has negative right and positive right combined. For the state, state departments shoulder the obligation of respecting negatively by not violating the right to life, the obligation of protecting positively by taking measures to protect the right to life, seeking the balance between negative obligation and positive obligation.The dissertation holds that there are at least three prerequisites in the realization of the constitutional safeguard of the right to life: firstly is the inclusion of the right to life into the constitution; secondly is the fulfillment of the constitutional obligation of respecting and protecting the right to life by the state agency; thirdly is the establishment of judicial review. The judicial review is the key to realizing the constitutional safeguard of the right to life, but isn't enough only with it, and should be supplemented by the system of constitutional interpretation, petition, question, recall or impeachment, and coordinated by relevant political, economic and cultural conditions. In addition, the special problems such as abortion and euthanasia in the constitutional protection of the right to life should be properly handled.The fundamental conclusion of the dissertation is: the right to life needs to be protected by the constitution, the protections will not only include the right to life in the constitution and keep it from state's encroachment, but also require the state to fulfill the obligation of protection while respecting the right to life negatively, its core is the review of unconstitution using the constitutional right to life as the criterion, the judicial review is key to the realization of the constitutional safeguard of the right to life, but it's not universal.