Natallie Evans has lost the final stage in her legal battle to conceive using frozen embryos against her former partner's consent. One can only have a deep human sympathy for her plight, but the decision in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights was expected and, legally speaking, the right one.

The Grand Chamber exercises an appeal jurisdiction within the European Court of Human Rights. It is unusual for disputes already decided in by the court in Strasbourg to proceed to this august body of 17 judges - it happens only in cases that raise a serious question of interpretation or application of the European Convention of Human Rights or a "serious issue of general importance". Ms Evans argued that the UK law permitting her former partner, Howard Johnson, to withdraw his consent violated the convention's provision for the right to life, respect for family life and not to be discriminated against.

She has now taken the case as far as she can, having first exhausted the English courts and now Europe. At every stage the judges have upheld English fertilisation laws. Those laws are unequivocal: Mr Johnston says he did not want to have the emotional and financial burden of being the father of her child forced upon him, and the laws governing the fertilisation arrangements he signed permit him to withdraw his consent. Plainly, that is the end of the argument.

The man's consent is needed at every stage for IVF treatment to go ahead; it is stipulated in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Sometimes senior British judges are able to "develop the law" - to change it, in other words - by applying general principles, and even public policy, to anachronistic rules. They can do that when the law they are changing is old and demonstrably outmoded common law (judge-made law), or even ancient, creaking legislation. But they cannot override the clear provisions of a recent and democratically passed piece of legislation. To do so would be to subvert the will of Parliament and of the people.

The case was never about who has the better moral argument. The best the law can do is fairly to apply the rules democratically put into legislation. And such an application clearly does not favour the implantation of an embryo without the consent of both those who made it.

Gary Slapper is the Professor of Law at the Open University

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