IT is lunacy, masquerading as human rights, to rule that a murderer has a right to family life.
This is what the European Court of Human Rights did in 2007 in the appalling case of Kirk Dickson, who kicked a man to death in 1995.
The outworking of that shameful ruling is that murderers and drug dealers are close to getting taxpayer- funded fertility treatment, with nightmarish implications.
Someone can terminate another person’s life, perhaps in a rage or perhaps deliberately, and then claim that they – the brutal perpetrator who has reduced another human being to dust – have the right to start a family.
In any remotely civilised country, such a killer will spend most of the rest of their life behind bars. In much of the world, they would be executed.
The Conservatives are rightly drawing up proposals to prevent the Strasbourg court pushing its remit.
But this notion that the most brutal members of society have a right to subsidised IVF raises other troubling questions about the ability of society to control rapid scientific advancements.
Some sperm donors in various parts of the world, including Britain, some of them unemployed, have sired dozens, even hundreds of children, who often live near each other, unaware. This has huge implications, including possible in-breeding among people who do not know they are siblings.
Monitoring such horrors in the future will be difficult.
But we can at least control the right of jailed murderers to start a family, by ensuring that they lose their freedom for most of the rest of their lives, and by telling Strasbourg to get lost.