Terminally ill 'should have right to assisted death'

London: Anyone given 12 months or less to live should have the legal right to ask a doctor to help them kill themselves in as easy and painless a manner as possible, an influential report said yesterday.

It said that to avoid unnecessary suffering, there should be a right to choose to die, but that it should be limited to those who have the mental capacity to express a wish to end their life and have been diagnosed with a terminal illness by two doctors.

Among a string of safeguards, it proposed a minimum two-week period in which the dying man or woman would be given time to change their mind.

Anyone physically unable to take the prescribed deadly drugs by themselves would be ruled out, to avoid the potential for abuse of the vulnerable by malevolent relatives or friends.

The report by the Commission on Assisted Dying, led by former Labour Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, stopped short of recommending euthanasia of the kind practised by the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

The commission was set up in 2010 amid the growing controversy over the deaths at Dignitas and the erosion of the 50-year-old law on assisted suicide which sets down a maximum 14-year jail sentence for anyone who ‘aids or abets' the death of another.

New rules

It followed new rules set down by director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, which effectively free people from the threat of criminal charges if they help the suicide of somebody who is desperately ill out of compassion and without thought for their own gain.

But right-to-life groups said the report was fixed in favour of calling for legalised assisted suicide. They pointed out that it was financed by author Sir Terry Pratchett and businessman Bernard Lewis, both prominent backers of assisted suicide. Lord Falconer, who chose the other ten members of the commission, himself led an attempt to bring in an assisted dying Bill in the Lords three years ago.

Clear framework

The 415-page report report set out in detail how a system of assisted dying would work. An individual would have to have been diagnosed by a doctor as having a terminal illness likely to kill them within a year. They would require the capacity to express the choice to die for themselves.

A second doctor would have to approve the first doctor's diagnosis and both would have to speak to the patient to make sure the decision to die was firm and was not made under pressure from others.

The report recommended that if either doctor was suspicious, then an independent assessment should be carried out by a nurse, care worker or social worker.

A doctor should collect the poison from a pharmacist and supervise the death. But the patient, the report said, should take the poison him or herself, preferably by mouth. A disabled patient might be allowed to use an automated syringe machine, it added.