Benjamin Bestgen

The recent case of Irish citizen Tori Towey’s arrest for being drunk and having attempted suicide in the United Arab Emirates made international headlines. Media reports suggest that she was suffering domestic violence at the hands of her South African husband and made a suicide attempt to escape her situation.

According to a WHO policy brief (2023), that makes the UAE one of 23 countries that still criminalise suicide and suicide attempts. For most British and European readers, bringing criminal charges against a person who tried to kill themselves sounds absurd as well as callous and cruel. Nowadays, we tend to view suicide and suicide attempts in most cases as tragedies and the survivor as deserving help. It is hard to imagine what benefit criminal charges and punishment could possibly bring for anyone.

But historically, suicide and attempted suicide were widely criminalised across European countries and in many other countries attempted suicide was a crime until very recently. For example, attempted suicide was a crime in England until 1961, in Ireland until 1993, in Pakistan until 2022, Singapore until 2020, Malaysia until 2023 and India until 2018. On the flipside, North Korea allegedly criminalised suicide and attempted suicide only recently in 2023, declaring it a treasonous offence – however, it is difficult to verify this with certainty.

The legal consequences of suicide or attempting it

In countries that still criminalise it, the penalties typically include fines and imprisonment. Foreigners may face deportation. The will of a suicide, if they had one, may be invalidated. The social stigma of a criminal conviction and shame around mental health, family problems, violence, sexual abuse, financial woes, illness or other despair that motivated the attempt comes on top.

Historically, the punishment could be more graphic: if the suicide was successful, the property of the deceased would often be confiscated, enriching the state or the clergy while pushing the surviving family into destitution. The deceased’s body would sometimes be mutilated by hacking off limbs or driving stakes through it, due to various superstitions around the evil nature of the ghosts of suicides. Honourable religious burials were refused and the corpse would be disposed of at crossroads, in remote areas, burned or thrown into rivers.

Unsuccessful suicide attempts could be punished with fines, corporeal punishment or imprisonment. Due to this, most people who felt suicidal had nowhere to turn to: the religious authorities would condemn the sin, the legal authorities would punish and society saw both mental ill health and suicide as shameful and taboo. This situation remains the case in countries that criminalise suicide or attempts, hindering people from seeking help, especially the poor, who have even fewer options.

Understandability

The psychiatrist Professor Leonardo Tondo (2018) notes that in the western world, moral (and hence legal) attitudes to suicide have varied since antiquity. An important aspect was (and remains) whether the suicide (or attempt) is deemed understandable enough to be justified or excused. Many more people attempt suicide than successfully complete one but in each case the question of “Why?” is at the forefront of anyone’s mind.

What we deem understandable is complex. It varies between cultures, times, attitudes to life and individual choices, social strata and the specific context of the suicide or attempt.

Throughout history, philosophers, clergy, lawyers and political figures considered reasons in favour or against criminalising or condemning suicide. Many of these views were grounded in religious doctrine, others employed secular approaches.

Religious perspectives

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all disapprove of suicide as a sin against God and a rejection of God’s gift of life. This view influenced legal thinking for centuries too, as laws tended to be founded on religious texts, principles and morals.

Medieval Christians further argued that it is a violation of the commandment that one shalt not murder. However, both the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Donne (1647), and Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1755) noted that the Bible does not prohibit suicide and the fifth commandment is a prohibition of homicide (killing others) only. It was also flagged that many more people were killed in religiously approved wars and persecutions than died from suicide. That indicates that the condemnation of suicide is somewhat hypocritical when the killing of others was (and still is) demanded or justified in the name of a deity.

Exemptions tended to be made if the person was not of sound mind when they attempted or completed the act. Typically, the clergy wielded significant power to judge whether a suicide could be excused in the eyes of God and earthly punishment avoided.

Outside the western world, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhist philosophies tend to condemn suicide as a grave violation. Though some provide for accepted forms of ending one’s life through voluntary starvation in cases of old age and serious illness (“when death is near”), which is not seen as suicidal: a person who has no desires, ambitions or responsibilities left in life and even rejects nutrition is trying to sever the last worldly attachments dispassionately. However, the religious criteria for this practice are not easy to satisfy.

Secular approaches

Tondo notes that Ancient Greece or Rome were relatively tolerant of suicide. When it was done by free citizens, several grounds were commonly accepted: to preserve or restore one’s honour and dignity, to end suffering from illness or old age, to atone on the battlefield for a military defeat, avoiding captivity or to simply end life when it was felt to have no meaning anymore.

However, suicide was also criticised as irrational and unbecoming for sensible members of society in most cases. Aristotle famously disapproved of it because it deprives society of the resources and skills of a member and by killing themselves, that person is failing their community. Attempting suicide was also periodically considered a crime for soldiers and slaves, likely for economic reasons: slaves were expensive property and soldiers were servants of the state, expensive to equip, train and maintain.

Centuries later, Rousseau (1761) argued that one should be free to end one’s life if one feels it is an insufferable burden and the poets of the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism movements justified suicide as the ultimate expression of deep human passions. Existentialist philosophers argued that suicide is an expression of one’s ultimate freedom to choose. Critics countered that attempting suicide reveals mental illness and can therefore never be freely chosen.

Others reasoned that unbearable suffering diminishes one’s quality of life so much that one should be permitted to end it. Towards the 21st century, the prevailing secular approach is that suicide should be viewed as a social and psychiatric issue rather than a criminal one.

Decriminalising suicide

Whatever one’s religious or philosophical view on suicide is, it should by now be evident that the criminal justice system is not the right instrument for addressing it. The vast majority of people who attempt suicide do so in a state of extreme upset and see no other solution for their predicament. While cultural attitudes and socio-economic factors around suicide are harder to change over night, legal rules can be changed comparatively easily. The resources saved by amending the law can arguably be better deployed by addressing the underlying causes that drive so many people towards attempts on their own life.

Benjamin Bestgen is a solicitor and notary public (qualified in Scotland). He holds a Master of Arts degree in philosophy and tutored in practical philosophy and jurisprudence at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main and the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of “Practical Jurisprudence – Attempts to make legal philosophy interesting” (2022).