The Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (NT) was a controversial law legalising euthanasia passed by Australia's Northern Territory in 1995 and, for all practical purposes, nullified in 1997 by the federal Parliament. Dr Philip Nitschke, the first doctor in the world to administer legal, voluntary euthanasia, founded EXIT International in response to the overturning of the Act.
While voluntary euthanasia had previously been condoned officially in the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon, the act was the first time that a legislative assembly passed a law explicitly legalising euthanasia.
Read more about Rights Of The Terminally Ill Act 1995: Provisions of Act, Reaction To Act, Use of Act, Overturning of The Act
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To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
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—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
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—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)