Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, this amendment is about life and death, and there are not many matters of greater import. We have to look at it a little broadly. 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. 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. Of course, that common position is less assured over whether we have the right to dispose of our own lives and, even less so, on whether we have the right or the obligation to assist others to do so. It seems to me that to claim, as the noble Baroness just did, that it is an act of discrimination not to assist a disabled person to take their own life, because an able-bodied person could take their own in the same circumstances, is a curious argument. One might as well say that, if a person is mentally ill and seeks to take their life, because they are disabled we should assist them to do so, because if they were able and had come to that conclusion they would have been able to do so. That is totally absurd. Amendment 66 would decriminalise, under prescribed circumstances, the giving of assistance to certain classes of people to take their own lives. It would require a particular group of people, the coroners, to issue licences of immunity—that is, certificates that would turn what would otherwise be a criminal offence into a normal act that was not criminal. I do not like the idea of giving certain classes of people that right or obligation to say in advance that a certain course of action, which would otherwise have been against the law, is within the law. In my view, that is to tread on a slope that is not merely slippery but downhill to an extent where not even the ingenuity of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, can effectively prescribe limits. I cannot imagine coroners welcoming this task of certifying who would qualify for a certificate of the kind described in the amendment, or which other group of people would be suitable for the job. Indeed, a coroner would have to decide whether the individual was capable of making a free and settled decision that he or she wanted to kill themselves. What about those suffering from dementia? How would they be treated? Would they be judged as being capable of taking a decision or not and, if not, would we be discriminating against them? 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.