Proposals for assisted suicide panels fall “lamentably short”, the former President of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales has warned.
Sir James Munby says he has examined Kim Leadbeater’s new proposals for her assisted suicide Bill and concluded that the plans need to go much further if the panel is to be anything more than a rubber-stamping exercise.
The ‘multidisciplinary’ panels are part of a hastily introduced amendment to try to fix the backbencher’s controversial Bill by replacing her ‘ultimate safeguard’ involving a High Court judge giving approval to a person’s request to be killed, with a three-member panel, comprised of a social worker, lawyer and psychiatrist.
The former judge raised concerns over the scope of the panel, explaining: “The panel is given an extraordinary degree of discretion in relation to the process it is to adopt.”
He highlighted that the only mandatory requirement of the panel is to hear from one of the two doctors involved in the patient’s request, and that anything further – even hearing from the patient – is at the panel’s discretion.
Sir James wrote that it is “very troubling” that there is an absence of “any requirement that the panel ‘must’ hear from and question both doctors (and not just one)”, and that the absence of “any requirement that the panel ‘must’ hear from and question the patient” is “quite extraordinary”.
He added: “Moreover, how is the panel to assess whether the application before it is voluntary if it does not hear from the patient?”
Sir James commented: “the Bill is silent as to the process and procedures to be adopted. For example, is the panel to hear evidence on oath? Indeed, will the panel have power to administer an oath?”
Another omission, he noted, is the lack of a procedure for challenging evidence: “It says nothing about who should exercise that function; nor about the nature of any independent evidential investigation and nothing about who is to undertake this and who is to pay for it.”
He continued: “Without this, it will not be proper for a judge to be involved in the process as a member of the panel. For otherwise, the judge, and, indeed the panel, is little more than a rubber stamp providing a veneer of judicial approbation – and that is fundamentally unacceptable.”