The appeal to the Strasbourg court was the last legal avenue available to Hollie Dance, 46, and Paul Battersbee, 57, from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, after the UK’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that further delaying the withdrawal of Archie’s life support would not be in his best interests. In the wake of Tuesday’s ruling, Dance said the Royal London Hospital intended to stop treatment at 11am on Wednesday, but as the deadline loomed, she revealed an application had been made to the ECHR. Barts Health NHS said it will not take any action while legal action is pending. Archie’s parents applied to the Strasbourg court for “provisional measures”, emergency court-ordered action in exceptional cases where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm. They usually involve the applicant seeking a stay of deportation or extradition while the case is pending, as in the case where the deportation flight from Rwanda was interrupted. In Archie’s case, the ECHR decided that they were not appropriate. The 12-year-old had been in a coma since suffering a catastrophic brain injury on April 7. Dance, who has been bedridden almost constantly since then, believes it was the result of choking while participating in a viral social media challenge. After a high court judge ruled, against his parents’ wishes, that doctors could withdraw his life support, the legal stay preventing the ruling was extended by the appeals court on July 25 to allow them give them the opportunity to appeal to the ECHR. Instead, they chose to petition the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to intervene, believing it offered a better chance of success. But when the high court ruled on Tuesday that the contract under which the commission operates did not form part of domestic law, the ECHR was the last option left to prevent the hospital from beginning to withdraw Archie’s life-support treatment.
