Should you, for any bizarre reason, feel like a period of abuse from outraged members of the public, try defending the European Court of Human Rights’ decision in the Abu Qatada case. One outraged viewer of a TV slot three weeks distant is still calling daily to express his anger. This is extreme but the public clearly has a widespread lack of understanding of human rights - which it all too widely understands as the asserted liberties of demented jihadi preachers, trouble-making criminals and other undesirable misfits. However, there are cases that show a very different aspect of the universality of human rights: that relating to the death of Melanie Rabone is one.
Melanie’s fate represents one feared by every parent with a strong imagination and an anxious disposition. On the surface, she was fine. She was brought up by her parents in Stockport; took a degree in social anthropology; got a job as a fundraiser; seemed bright and attractive. However, from the age of 19 she suffered increasingly from depression. In March 2005, at the age of 24, she first tried to hang herself with a pillow case and then cut her wrists with broken glass. Her GP got her admitted as a voluntary patient to Stepping Hill Hospital.
Nevertheless, she then both attempted to hang herself with a lamp flex and appeared to have collected materials to have another go. Notwithstanding that, towards the end of the month, she was allowed out for the weekend. She spent the first day largely with her mother. On the second day Melanie hanged herself in a park at a local beauty spot. An inquest gave a verdict of suicide. The hospital admitted negligence and settled its liability under the appropriate legislation for £7,500 and costs.
The matter might have ended there but for the determination of Melanie’s parents. They argued that under the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights the hospital had failed in its duty (often referred to in jargon as its ‘operational obligation’) to take real and active steps to prevent her taking her own life under article 2 of the convention.
The issue that outraged Mr and Mrs Rabone was the unresponsiveness of those in power. Melanie was assessed in the hospital as having a ‘severe depressive episode’ and at high risk of ‘depressive self harm’. Yet she was released a week later on the judgement of a doctor into the care of her mother who expressed her fears vociferously. After Melanie’s death, the health service established an investigation but Mr Rabone, in the words of the Court of Appeal, ‘contacted the NHS trust on more than one occasion, expressing justifiable concern about the delays in the investigation’. It looked like nothing was happening very fast.
Thus, the issue at the core of this case was the accountability of power. As Baroness Hale put it: ‘We are here because the ordinary law of tort does not recognise or compensate the anguish suffered by parents who are deprived of the life of their adult child… No one who reads the hospital notes of the series of telephone calls made by this patient’s father to the hospital on the night in question can be in any doubt of that; or that the agony may be made worse by knowing that the loss both could and should have been prevented.’ In allowing Melanie’s return home against the wishes of her mother, the doctor made no assessment of risk and no proper planning for her care.
Mr Rabone summed up the judgment’s import for the BBC: ‘In all the past judgments, it was never clear whether somebody who was not detained by an authority - be it a prisoner or a hospital patient - was not subject to article 2 in terms of protecting their life. The judgment that has been made today clears that distinction completely away and hopefully it will mean hospitals will have to take far more notice in terms of the care… It is irrelevant whether a patient is sectioned or not.’ His wife added: ‘What it’s achieved is something that’s worthwhile and I know that if Melanie was here she’d be so pleased.’
Abu Qatada’s European court case attracted, on a loose count, something like 3,000 news stories in the month of its delivery. By contrast, the Rabone case barely got 60. The figures may be somewhat approximate, but they undoubtedly represent the relative interest in the two cases. There is, of course, no doubt about the importance of the decision in the Abu Qatada case. It challenged the intention of the UK government to send him back to Jordan. The Rabone case is much different. No Cabinet ministers were involved. No one frothed at the mouth at the impertinence of the court. No one kept ringing the office when they got back home after a lunchtime pint even though Justice intervened in both cases.
All that happened was that two distraught parents were vindicated in their belief that a hospital, as a public authority, was under a duty to take reasonable steps to protect the life of someone who was a manifest suicide risk. The Human Rights Act gave them a remedy that they did not previously have. That has to be remembered in the political battle that is to come on the future of the Human Rights Act and the continuing commitment of the UK to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice
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