My Lords, I declare my registered interest in policing. I support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and other noble Lords, for the reasons that he outlined. At Second Reading I expressed a wish that the involvement of the High Court was perhaps the way forward on this issue. Like many of your Lordships, I had the privilege and honour of sitting through the previous debates on this issue, and like everyone in this House, past and present, we felt enormous compassion and wanted to find a way through this issue, which resonated with the feelings out there in the wider community.
For my own part, I have never been able to be satisfied that abuse, coercion and the prospect of malpractice of the sort outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, were addressed in our previous attempts to deal with this tragic issue. However, we are now tantalisingly close to finding a way through this issue. It will assuage those of us who fear abuse, coercion, the right to die becoming the duty to die, and so on. Therefore I hope that we will find a way through this issue that involves judicial oversight and scrutiny.
At the moment I find myself favouring the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in his amendments, as a medical-based approach but with judicial verification and oversight, because it is not quite so bureaucratic as the way forward suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. However, I hope we will find a way through this issue through judicial intervention.