On 11 March 2026, a two-judge bench permitted withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from a thirteen-year permanent-vegetative-state patient, classifying clinically assisted nutrition and hydration as medical treatment under the Common Cause framework.
On 9 March 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously held that the right to die with dignity is part of the right to life under Article 21, legalised passive euthanasia, and recognised the Advance Medical Directive (the 'living will') as the procedural mechanism through which an individual's end-of-life preferences could be honoured. The judgment is the foundational architecture of end-of-life law in India. A digest of the holding, the procedural framework, and the 2023 simplification that followed.
Seven years before *Common Cause* would articulate the comprehensive constitutional framework, *Aruna Shanbaug* recognised passive euthanasia in Indian law for the first time. The 2011 disposition — addressing a petition seeking withdrawal of life support for a nurse who had been in a persistent vegetative state for nearly four decades following a brutal sexual assault — supplied the doctrinal architecture that *Common Cause* would later complete. A digest of the case, the holding, and the relationship between the two judgments.