85. In Botta, as we have seen, the court identified a person’s ‘physical and psychological integrity’ as being part of the private life protected by Article 8 and which the State may in principle be under an obligation to take positive steps to protect. In the present type of case this ‘physical and psychological integrity’ embraces, though it is not of course confined to, two particularly important concepts which for the purposes of proper analysis it is desirable to distinguish and consider separately.

86. The first is human dignity. True it is that the phrase is not used in the Convention but it is surely immanent in Article 8, indeed in almost every one of the Convention’s provisions. The recognition and protection of human dignity is one of the core values – in truth the core value – of our society and, indeed, of all the societies which are part of the European family of nations and which have embraced the principles of the Convention. It is a core value of the common law, long pre-dating the Convention and the Charter. The invocation of the dignity of the patient in the form of declaration habitually used when the court is exercising its inherent declaratory jurisdiction in relation to the gravely ill or dying is not some meaningless incantation designed to comfort the living or to assuage the consciences of those involved in making life and death decisions: it is a solemn affirmation of the law’s and of society’s recognition of our humanity and of human dignity as something fundamental. Not surprisingly, human dignity is extolled in Article 1 of the Charter, just as it is in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration. And the latter’s call to us to ‘act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’ is nothing new. It reflects the fourth Earl of Chesterfield’s injunction, ‘Do as you would be done by’ and, for the Christian, the biblical call (Matthew ch 7, v 12): ‘all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets’.

99. The other important concept embraced in the ‘physical and psychological integrity’ protected by Article 8 is the right of the disabled to participate in the life of the community and to have what has been described (see below) as ‘access to essential economic and social activities and to an appropriate range of recreational and cultural activities’. This is matched by the positive obligation of the State to take appropriate measures designed to ensure to the greatest extent feasible that a disabled person is not ‘so circumscribed and so isolated as to be deprived of the possibility of developing his personality’.