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Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, this Bill has been called a ragbag, if not a dog’s breakfast. I suppose the items in the Bill are linked together vaguely by a concept of justice, but like my noble and learned friend, Lord Lloyd of Berwick I pity the Minister when he has to make some sense of all the completely different topics that have been touched on today. I shall speak briefly on one topic: Clauses 49 and 50 seek to amend the Suicide Act 1961 with the aim of bringing it up to date. What I say will be a footnote to what has already been said by other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Taverne. I understand and applaud the Government’s desire to be able to prosecute those who publicise suicide over the internet, and, for whatever motive, malicious or missionary, positively encourage young people to kill themselves. My noble friend Lady Finlay has spoken very eloquently on this subject and I agree with everything that she says. Clauses 49 and 50 would criminalise in exactly the same way, and to the same degree, these dangerous people who are putting young lives at risk and who are broadcasting their thoughts and encouragement to the world at large as the other group of people who, perhaps with agonies of conscience, assist individuals who they know and love to end their lives when living is no longer tolerable to them. These two target groups are so radically different, one from another, that they really cannot be treated in the same way by the law. From the cases we know about, the notion of encouraging suicide is miles away from the thoughts of those who often are persuaded only with great difficulty to help their relatives to go abroad. I am thinking of the well publicised case of the Turner family where the three children were eventually persuaded that their mother, a doctor, really did want to end her life before it became more intolerable than it was. There was simply no question of encouraging suicide because they did their very best to dissuade her from going, but at last were won over and in the end felt that what they had done was right. If the law treats cases that are so different from one another as if they are the same, that will lead to total confusion. As the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, reminded us, it goes without saying that the issue of accompanying relatives abroad has become urgent because of the much-publicised recent cases. Also, none of the more than 100 people who have done this has been prosecuted, although there is no doubt whatever that under the 1961 Act they were assisting a suicide and therefore committing a crime. Some lawyers think that the status quo should stay as it is or that the law as it would be amended by Clauses 49 and 50 will be adequate. For myself, I believe that the present situation is fraught with too much uncertainty. The fact is that the Director of Public Prosecutions has not clearly stated why no one has been prosecuted. To say that this is because no jury would convict is to give away the situation, to give away how people in general, through the jury, feel about the act of assisted suicide. It acknowledges that people do not regard it as a crime and therefore they would not find guilty a person who had done it. To say that it would not be in the public interest is to explain nothing. So there is no clarity in the law at the moment, and a law that never leads to a prosecution is both futile and open to abuse. We need a clear law that contains safeguards so that only those who really want to die and who are able to prove it will be taken to Switzerland. In saying that the law should be changed, I am merely echoing the words of, among others, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bingham, and Lord Justice Scott Baker, who asserted that the law must be changed and that it is the task of Parliament to change it. The present Bill affords Parliament a chance to do that and amendments will be brought forward at a later stage that can be discussed in detail.