Politicians set to vote with their consciences over assisted suicide

Published on Friday 20 March 2009 21:12

MPS could have a free vote on a bid to prevent people facing the threat of prosecution if they help terminally ill patients to die abroad, it emerged yesterday.

Former health secretary Patricia Hewitt wants to change the law to protect friends and relatives who help people to go to a country where assisted dying is lawful.

Her amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill may be debated by the Commons next week – if the Speaker, Michael Martin, selects it – and the government has indicated that MPs will be free to vote with their consciences.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "This will be treated as a matter for individual MPs to decide how to vote."

The spokesman added that Gordon Brown was not in favour of a change in the law. He said that allowing the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide whether to prosecute people alleged to have assisted suicide was the "best solution".

More than 100 Britons are thought to have gone to Switzerland to die in clinics run by the organisation Dignitas. No-one providing assistance has been prosecuted but several family members have been questioned. Normally the DPP decides that prosecutions are not in the public interest.

Ms Hewitt's amendment, backed by Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs, seeks to amend the Suicide Act 1961, which does not apply in Scotland, by saying an offence will not have taken place if assistance is given "solely or principally" for helping someone to go to an assisted dying clinic.

A separate motion calling for the issue to be debated has the support of 102 MPs, including Scots Sir Menzies Campbell, Alistair Carmichael and Jim Devine.

Ms Hewitt said her amendment was only "reinforcing the current prosecution policy" in England and Wales.

In Scotland, common law rules on culpable homicide could be used by prosecutors. Margo MacDonald, the independent MSP, aims to put a bill to the Scottish Parliament to legalise assisted suicide.

Ms Hewitt said: "In the long term, we need a bill to change the law to allow terminally ill, mentally competent adults suffering at the end of their lives the choice of an assisted death, within safeguards, in this country.

"In the meantime, I hope that the amendment I have tabled will prompt the long overdue parliamentary debate necessary to bring the law on assisted suicide in line with the practice of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the courts."

Last month, the Court of Appeal ruled that Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis and wanted a guarantee that no charges would be brought against her husband if he helped her go abroad to die, was not entitled to such specific legal guidance.

Lesley Close, who accompanied her terminally ill brother John to Switzerland for an assisted suicide in 2003, said. "That amendment would make such a difference to people planning their loved ones' last journeys."

But Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile, a prominent critic of previous attempts to legalise assisted dying in the UK, said: "Making the law prescriptive, in the way Patricia Hewitt is attempting to do, will make it much more difficult for the attorney-general and the DPP to exercise their discretion and one should not underestimate the importance of that discretion as part of our unwritten constitution."

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of the Dignity in Dying group, said the bill failed to distinguish between maliciously encouraging a suicide and compassionately assisting a terminally ill, mentally competent adult who wants to die.

Peter Saunders, director of the Care Not Killing alliance, said: "The result would be a law that discouraged suicide with one hand and encouraged it with the other. That would be farcical as well as tragic."