January 29, 2025
Read the Spanish version here.
On January 27, 2025, members of the O’Neill Institute’s Center for Health and Human Rights (CHHR) filed an amicus curiae brief in the “unconstitutionality action” No. 22-24/IN (currently under review by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador) in favor of the decriminalization of abortion. This constitutional challenge was filed in March of 2024 by a movement composed of diverse Ecuadorian civil society organizations gathered under the name of “Justa Libertad”. This lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of Article 149 of the Penal Code, with the aim of eliminating the crime of abortion from Ecuador’s domestic legislation.
CHHR’s intervention seeks to provide the Court with a human rights and public health-based analysis that supports the claims of the petitioners. To do this, CHHR analyzes the ways in which the use of criminal law to address abortion is problematic in light of international human rights law applicable to Ecuador.
The amicus also highlights the importance of conducting a thorough proportionality analysis, balancing the aims pursued by the criminalization of abortion and the severe impacts that such criminalization has on the rights to life, personal integrity, health, freedom, autonomy, dignity, and equality and non-discrimination of women and girls.
CHHR also stresses that it is essential to include public health evidence at every stage of the proportionality analysis. This evidence includes empirical data on the severe impacts of criminalization on maternal mortality and morbidity and demonstrates the ineffectiveness of criminalization in preventing abortion in practice. Public health evidence also demonstrates the efficacy of less harmful measures, including comprehensive and sustainable policies to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce abortion.
CHHR also presents the Court with comparative law examples in which other high courts in the region have decriminalized abortion broadly, after finding norms that criminalize abortion or permit it only in extreme contexts to be unconstitutional. In particular, CHHR focuses on the examples of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Mexico and the Constitutional Court of Colombia — both of which have declared criminal systems that restricted abortion unconstitutional, relying on human rights and public health arguments.
The Center for Health and Human Rights believes this case offers an extraordinary opportunity for the Constitutional Court of Ecuador to examine the harmful impacts of abortion criminalization on the health and human rights of women, girls, and persons with the capacity for pregnancy in Ecuador and hopes that the honorable Court will consider its contribution to their analysis.