Top lawyers back assisted dying Bill - The Jewish Chronicle

Two of the country’s most prominent Jewish legal figures have given their support to a bill to legalise assisted dying which is currently under consideration in the House of Lords.

The move, proposed by cross-bench peer Baroness Meacher, would enable someone to help a terminally person who was expected to die within six months to end their life.

But Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has opposed it as “unsafe” along with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and England’s most senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Vincent Nichols.

Most of the Jewish peers who spoke during the second reading of the bill on Friday, however, supported it.

Lord Neuberger, a former president of the Supreme Court, said,” If you want to end your life, you are entitled to do so, and if you have a fundamental right to end your life, you must require very powerful reasons why you should be denied assistance if you need to exercise that right and cannot do it without assistance.”

The Bill, he added, provided “for full protection and if, as some have suggested, it is not full enough or could be improved, the Bill can be amended; it should not be ended.

“The fact that there will be occasional abuses, as there always are in a free society, is far outweighed by the enormous amount of suffering, relatively speaking, that will be ended if the Bill becomes law.”

Lord Etherton, who retired as Master of the Rolls earlier this year, said, . “Personal autonomy is an inseparable aspect of human dignity, which has been at the heart of the western concept of human rights since the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.”

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former Supreme Court justice, also backed the Bill.

Lord Leigh of Hurley, who referred to his Progressive Jewish allegiance, said, “There is no doubt that the Old Testament believes in the sanctity of life, or, as Tevye the milkman used to say, ‘To life!’

“’To life!’ does not mean that we should believe in the sanctity of suffering. Suffering is to be avoided at all costs.”

But Lord Gold said the Bill was “dangerous and should be rejected”.

He referred to the risk of patients being made to feel “guilty that they continue to live, that they are a burden and an expense on the family, and that it would be better for everyone if they were no more. How does one determine whether such hidden persuasion has occurred?”

Lord Grade, after acknowledging he had been undecided, concluded, “I just cannot overcome my fundamental fear that to legalise assisted dying would be so far beyond any safeguarding regulation or statute we might draft in Parliament that the risks of abuse would be too great.”