The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has rejected an appeal by a French woman who was forced to have an abortion after a doctor's mistake.
Ms Thi-Nho Vo complained that France had violated the right to life of her unborn child, after French courts refused to convict the doctor of involuntary homicide.
She was operated on by accident after being mistaken for a patient with the same name, leading to her foetus being aborted.
She took the case to the European court after France's highest court overturned the doctor's conviction on a charge of involuntary homicide, ruling the foetus was not yet a human being entitled to the protection of criminal law.
In a majority decision, the 17-judge panel rejected her demands it grant full human rights to a foetus, saying it was up to national governments to decide on the issue.
The court in Strasbourg ruled that the issue of when the right to life begins "was a question to be decided at national level . . . because the issue had not been decided within the majority of states" which have ratified the European Convention on human rights.
The court said that at European level "there was no consensus on the nature and a status of the embryo and/or foetus".
The ECHR concluded it "was neither desirable, nor even possible . . . to answer in the abstract the question whether the unborn child was a person."
The decision was welcomed by abortion rights groups, which argued that accepting a right to life for a foetus could make abortions illegal in all countries that recognise the court's jurisdiction.