from RightToLife
The assisted suicide Bill Committee scrutinising Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill met for its fifth week of sittings last week to continue its line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill.
On 11 and 12 March, MPs on the Committee made the decision to remove the High Court safeguard, trumpeted by Bill sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, before the debate at Second Reading, making her Bill different from all other assisted dying legislation anywhere in the world.
Instead, the relevant clause, which has now been removed, will likely be replaced by an assisted suicide panel. The Committee will consider whether to add the “Assisted Dying Review Panels” to the Bill during debate this week.
High Court judge safeguard rejected
Despite facing a major backlash against proposals to remove the centrepiece High Court safeguard from her assisted suicide Bill, Kim Leadbeater proceeded to remove the flagship safeguard by joining colleagues in voting to successfully remove the Court approval clause from the Bill.
In the build-up to the vote in November, Leadbeater boasted her Bill has “the strictest safeguards anywhere in the world”, highlighting the High Court judge safeguard as evidence for this. This provision in the Bill was repeatedly positioned by Leadbeater and her allies as a key component of the Bill.
Leadbeater has proposed that the flagship High Court safeguard will be replaced by what has been labelled by media outlets as a ‘death czar’ who will oversee panels, dubbed the ‘death panels’, that will include a more junior legal figure, a social worker and a psychiatrist.
Legal experts have been very critical of the new plan, highlighting several major issues with the new proposed replacement.
The panels will include a social worker and psychiatrist and risk taking them away from their frontline work in areas where there are already major shortages.
Opponent of the assisted suicide Bill Danny Kruger MP suggested that the removal of the High Court safeguard revealed that the intent of the architects of the Bill was not that the Bill might be restricted to a select few, but that state-assisted suicide would be widely available.