In October 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) adopted General Comment 361 on Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the guarantee of the right to life. The UNHRC is a part-time body made up of eighteen human rights experts from around the world, and it supervises and monitors the implementation of the ICCPR. It is a quasi-judicial body rather than an international court, so its findings, including in documents like General Comment 36, are not strictly legally binding in international law. However, its findings are authoritative interpretations of a document that is legally binding, the ICCPR. General Comments normally constitute expanded interpretations of particular rights in the treaty, such as the right to life.2 General Comment 36 updates and replaces two earlier General Comments on Article 6, General Comment 6 (1982)3 and General Comment 14 (1984).4 General Comment 36 is far more detailed than those earlier documents, reflecting the considerable developments in UNHRC jurisprudence on the right to life since the early 1980s. In this Note, I will concentrate on the most significant of those developments, in particular those areas where the General Comment seems to extend the UNHRC’s prior jurisprudence, or where further clarification is needed on the scope of the right to life.5