A former supreme court judge has told MPs that applications for assisted dying should not need high court approval.
Lord Sumption told a committee scrutinising the assisted dying bill that the requirement for signoff by a high court judge was “unnecessary and in some respects undesirable”. No other jurisdiction in the world that allows assisted dying has such a requirement, he said.
The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill would allow adults in England and Wales with less than six months to live to end their lives, subject to approval by two doctors and a high court judge.
Sumption, who served in the UK’s supreme court until 2018, said: “It is not entirely clear what the judge is supposed to do … Is he there to ensure that the two doctors have done their job and the ducks are all in a row, or is he there to form his own view on these matters, completely independently of all those who have given certificates?
“If the latter, one is talking about quite a time-consuming process, involving a lot of additional evidence. It seems to me this is a protection which no other country, so far that I am aware of among those who have authorised assisted dying, have included.”
He said a proposal for a special panel of judges to deal with assisted dying applications might “resolve the problem of the shortage of capacity in the high court. It would not, however, resolve the problem of the overengineering of the procedural provisions of this bill.”
The clause “infers a protection that is largely illusory and undoubtedly very time-consuming … It involves the intervention of the state in an intensely personal agonising process, which to my mind is inappropriate.”
MPs also heard doctors from Australian states which have legalised assisted dying argue that the criterion of six months to live should be increased to 12 months.
Dr Cam McLaren, a Melbourne oncologist, said: “I always say to people, we do not know they have six months left to live until they have six weeks left to live. And we as oncologists know, in the matter of one CT scan, we can change a person’s prognosis from 18 months to three months.
“All of a sudden they see their life ending and then they begin an [assisted dying] application that takes a month to apply.”
Dr Clare Fellingham, the deputy director of medical services at Royal Perth hospital, said the UK had a “golden opportunity to look across every jurisdiction that already has laws in operation, and cherrypick the very best bits of what is working well in those jurisdictions to create the very best, most robust but also most patient-centred legislation you can”.
Other witnesses raised concerns about the bill. Chelsea Roff, the founder of Eat Breathe Thrive, said at least 60 people with eating disorders had successfully applied for an assisted death in other jurisdictions. People with diseases such as diabetes and HIV/Aids may also be able to circumvent terminal illness criteria by refusing medication or sustenance, she said.
Richard Robinson, the chief executive of Hourglass, said there was “an epidemic of abuse against older people at the moment” which was “vastly underplayed”. Older people would be vulnerable to pressure to opt for an assisted death despite the safeguarding provisions in the bill, he said.
Sumption said: “I think we must all be conscious of the fact that coercion, even when it is overtly applied, is extraordinarily difficult to detect.”
He added: “We have to live with the limitations of what human beings can do.”
