Dominic Grieve KC has unleashed a scathing attack on Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill and told the government to oppose it “on rule of law grounds”.
The former Attorney General for England and Wales predicted that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would block a UK law on assisted suicide, as it would be implemented as a “state service”.
He expressed his “grave concerns” about the controversial Bill alongside four other former government law officers in a letter to MPs this week.
Lacks safeguards
Mr Grieve wrote that the usual process is for Private Members Bills to be assessed for compatibility with human rights and the rule of law before Second Reading if the government does not oppose it, but that: “Most surprisingly, this does not seem to have happened in the case of the assisted dying bill.”
He noted that: “The Strasbourg court has held that the decriminalising of assisted suicide will breach the state’s positive obligation to protect life if it is not accompanied by adequate and appropriate safeguards to protect patients from pressure and abuse.
“The bill fails to provide such safeguards.”
It is not an exaggeration to describe this bill as skeleton legislation. Former Attorney General for England and Wales Dominic Grieve
State-sanctioned death
Another former Attorney General, Suella Braverman KC, has also voiced concerns, calling the legislation “a clear step down a slippery slope toward what, in my view, could eventually become institutionalised, state-sanctioned death”.
Mrs Braverman, who also served as Home Secretary, added: “This Bill would give the state a formal role in deciding who lives and who dies. Involving the apparatus of the state in such intimate, human experiences is a line we should not cross.”
The current Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Labour’s Shabana Mahmood, recently wrote to her constituents to say “the state should serve a clear role. It should protect and preserve life, not take it away. The state should never offer death as a service”.
the greatest risk of all is the pressure the elderly, vulnerable, sick or disabled may place upon themselves
She continued: “It cannot be overstated what a profound shift in our culture assisted suicide will herald. In my view, the greatest risk of all is the pressure the elderly, vulnerable, sick or disabled may place upon themselves.”
Former PMs
Four former Prime Ministers, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Liz Truss, and Gordon Brown are also understood to oppose the assisted suicide legislation.
Truss told The Daily Telegraph: “It is wrong in principle: organs of the state like the NHS and the judicial system should be protecting lives, not ending them.”
Writing in The Guardian, Brown said the country should focus on looking at ways of “improving all-round hospice care” rather than deciding “whether to legislate on ways to die”.
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