Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (LD)]

My Lords, if this Bill passes into law it will, I believe, herald a fundamental and irreversible shift in the attitude of the state to the deliberate application of death. If it takes place, I am sure that this shift will in time, and perhaps not long into the future, bring further changes in our approach to death by human hand. Many people will support this present shift and some will support the shifts to come. For my part, I do not.

When I was the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2003 and 2008, scores of these cases came across my desk. They are always considered by the DPP personally, not by a lawyer in his office. I did not in a single circumstance authorise a prosecution against anyone who, through compassion, had helped a son, a daughter, a husband, a mother or a friend to die. It was as long ago as 1949 that Hartley Shawcross, the great Nuremberg prosecutor and Attorney-General in the post-war Attlee Government, reminded the House of Commons that it has never been the law of England that in every case where there is sufficient evidence for a prosecution, that prosecution must be brought. That is because in this jurisdiction we have always understood that inflexibility and justice rarely go hand in hand. There is nothing new in that; it has been part of our system of justice over the years. So it is that prosecutors have, and always have had, a discretion. Where there is sufficient evidence, they have always asked themselves, “Would it be in the public interest to prosecute this case?”.

The position we have arrived at in this country is this: a broad prohibition of law to deter those who might take action through venal motives—and such people do exist. It would be foolish to assume that everyone counselling a suicide acts from pure motives or that venality is always absent. However, coupled with that prohibition of law is a clearly defined discretion to protect those who face an impossible choice and who act from motives that are beyond reproach. Under the system as it presently exists, they do not and they will not face prosecution. To those who respond by saying, “But these people face the uncertainty of investigation before they are relieved of the threat of prosecution”, my response is that surely it is unthinkable, even under the scheme being proposed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that there should be no inquiry following an assisted death, if only to determine that a detailed and prescriptive law such as the one he is proposing has been complied with and not broken. There will always be an inquiry and there should always be an inquiry. If I am wrong about that, and if in fact we are being invited to enter a world in which the deliberate infliction of death is protected from inquiry, I believe that we should decline that invitation, as I do.