Andrea Williams

Last night Lord Alderdice's amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill was withdrawn. The amendment sought to remove the possibility of prosecution for those who help a person to die where that person has an incurable and disabling illness and a coroner has certified that the person has a free and settled wish to die.

This would be wrong in principle and open to massive abuse. The amendment was opposed by a majority of those Lords who spoke in the debate.

In giving concluding remarks, Lord Bach said that their 'firm view remains that the Coroners and Justice Bill has never been, and is not now the appropriate vehicle for change in the criminal law as it applies to assisted suicide.'

Baroness Campbell of Surbiton expressed her concerns with the amendment. She said:

'If we support this amendment today, we say that terminally ill and severely disabled people do not deserve the very best forum and process to deliberate their life and death choices. The amendment has profound, far-reaching consequences, which strike fear - I am afraid it is fear - and apprehension into the lives of those who struggle to make society recognise that their lives have value and should be supported.'

Lord Tebbit said that the law provides that we, as individuals, have no right to take life except in self-defence.

'It provides that the state, in acting for society, may take life or license the taking of life only in defence of the state or society itself. In short, the right or obligation to take life, or to license the taking of life, is strictly fettered and confined, and I believe that it should be so,' he said.

'Many of those who regard humankind as no more than elevated animals are no less wary of fraying and fretting at those constraints than those who believe that life is God-granted and that the taking of life is to infringe on divine territory.

'I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, really has his heart in this. The expression, 'bring their life to a close', has about it a taint of weasel words to avoid the use of the more accurate words 'kill themselves'.

'The plain fact is that there have been no prosecutions of people who have facilitated suicide by delivering those for whom life has become an excessive burden to the suicide factories in Switzerland. The fact that there could be such a prosecution may have deterred - indeed, I am sure that it has deterred - the compassionate from assisting the act of suicide in that way. Far more important, it has also deterred those who might have exerted pressure on a weak, ill and vulnerable person from whose death they might profit. In my view, the law is working perfectly well, or in some cases not working at all perfectly well, and we should leave it alone.'