Tuesday 17 December 2013

"We tinker with assisted suicide laws at our peril."

From The Telegraph,

One of Britain’s most eminent authorities on end-of-life law has issued a warning against “tinkering” with assisted suicide on the eve of a landmark Supreme Court challenge.
Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former President of the High Court Family Division, argued that the current law strikes a careful balance between justice and mercy, adding: “We tinker with it at our peril”.
Relaxing the law to allow assisted suicide in certain circumstances would turn a long-established legal boundary into nothing more than a weak “line in the sand”, she insisted.
Her warning, in an article in The Sunday Telegraph, will be seen as a message to some of Britain’s most senior judges, who will begin hearing an attempt to introduce a right to die under human rights legislation.
A full panel of nine Supreme Court Justices, headed by Lord Neuberger, the court's President, will convene tomorrow to hear the culmination of three separate legal challenges to the current ban, stretching back five years.