Guidelines on assisted suicide law will be published by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) this Wednesday, 23 September 2009, to clarify when people who help others to commit suicide are likely to be prosecuted.
Keir Starmer, the DPP, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show on Sunday that families helping terminally ill loved ones to commit suicide will not be prosecuted as long as they do not ‘encourage’ them and only help to assist a ‘clear and settled intention’ to die.
‘The general approach we’ve taken is to steer a careful course between protecting the vulnerable from those that might gain from hastening their death but also identifying those cases where nobody really thinks it's in the public interest to prosecute,’ Mr Starmer QC said.
‘We have to look at each case on its merits but the idea is to bring clarity. It's about people being able to understand the basis on which we take decisions,’ he added.
He said that assisted suicide was still illegal, however, and would remain so even after the guidance was issued.
The news has caused concern amongst those who believe that a lenient approach will encourage unscrupulous relatives to pressure the vulnerable into suicide and a Government Minister, Ed Balls, has urged extreme caution warning elderly people might come under pressure ‘to do the right thing’. He warned the DPP ‘to err on the side of caution’.
Dr Brian Iddon, Labour MP for Bolton South East, said that the guidelines should not be published as the DPP has been using them successfully behind the scenes for years. In his letter to The Times he wrote:
‘... more than 100 people who accompanied their relatives to the Dignitas clinic have been interviewed by the police, but no one has been prosecuted.
‘These are complicated cases and every one is different. It is nigh on impossible to write guidelines that will cover all circumstances. Now Keir Starmer has been forced to publish the guidelines, it will make life difficult for police and prosecutors to carry out their work.’
(See also the CCFON report)
The Daily Mail newspaper commented on the expected approach to the issue. It said:
‘This approach may sound fair but it raises more questions than answers. For example, those who assist suicides are usually close relatives who will often gain from the dead person's estate. Should they automatically be prosecuted?
‘Equally, as most suicides are committed in private, who is to say whether those present encouraged or merely assisted?
‘Investigations would surely have to be more thorough and protracted than now, with all the added distress that would entail, and it is quite possible more people would be brought to court, not fewer.
'The old system was murky and rather arbitrary but it just about worked. In trying to bring clarity and greater protection for the vulnerable, Mr Starmer threatens to bring more complexity to what is already a moral and legal minefield.’
The expected guidelines follow a string of cases in which terminally ill people from Britain have ended their lives at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Relatives who have helped them – as in the case of 23-year-old Daniel James, who was paralysed from the chest down after dislocating his spine in a rugby match – have in theory broken the law, but Mr Starmer decided not to prosecute.
At the end of July, following a case brought by Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis and wanted to know in advance if her husband would be prosecuted for assisting with her death, the Law lords asked Mr Starmer ‘to prepare an offence-specific policy identifying the facts and circumstances which he will take into account on deciding, in cases such as Ms Purdy’s, whether or not to prosecute’.
George Pitcher, a journalist and Religion Editor for The Daily Telegraph, wrote in his recent article:
‘Stand by, after the DPP has done his business, for calls for the Suicide Act to be repealed, once it has been so effectively undermined. Which I suspect was precisely the intention of those Lords and their pro-suicide friends. Make an ass of the law and the law must be changed.
‘What's so dispiriting about all this is that a deathly cabal is succeeding in usurping an age-old provenance of life over death without proper parliamentary debate. We will end up with a Dignitas-style clinic, with its grotesque aspirations to self-destruction as a consumer choice, in Britain.
‘The DPP’s draft guidelines will turn into policy next year, possibly after a general election. David Cameron's family has had tragic cause this year, with the death of severely disabled six-year-old Ivan, to know the unique value and sanctity of every human life, however afflicted.’
Dr Peter Saunders, Director of Care Not Killing, an alliance of over 40 organisations who are opposed to the legalisation of euthanasia or physician assisted suicide in the United Kingdom and promote more and better palliative care, said:
‘We shall be studying the draft guidelines carefully when they are published and responding formally to the consultation on them. We would expect the draft guidelines to seek to clarify the facts and circumstances to which the DPP will have regard in deciding whether or not prosecution in cases of assisted suicide is appropriate.
‘We would not expect, as has been implied in some quarters, that they will offer immunity from prosecution for assistance with suicide in particular circumstances.
‘Assisted suicide is against the law and it is Parliament’s responsibility to decide whether the law should be changed. Parliament has voted twice in the last three years against such legalising assisted suicide.'
Care Not Killing Alliance have issued a brief ‘Questions & Answers’ paper aiming to explain the current situation with the guidelines to assisted suicide.
(Click here to read the paper)
It has been reported today that at the time Britain decides whether to make an assisted suicide easier for its citizens, Switzerland, the only country with a medical clinic prepared to receive them, is considering how to make the process more difficult.
Switzerland's justice minister, Eveline Widmer Schlumpf, suggests that the law on assisted suicide in her country should be tightened. At least two of her colleagues in the Swiss cabinet believe it should be outlawed altogether.
(See the Independent report)
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