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Assisted Suicide

My starting point is that I want our law and our legal practice to be clear but flexible. In his excellent introduction to the debate, the hon. Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) said that decisions about the law should be made by Parliament and not by the courts, but these decisions are not court decisions. They relate to how to decide whether it is right, necessary or humane to pursue a prosecution according to the circumstances of a particular case. I support the motion, but I regard the amendment as an unfortunate attempt to hijack the debate. It is a Trojan horse attempting to change the law, and I do not want the law to be changed in either direction. There is a certain amount of pull from people on either side who are often, understandably, informed by specific cases, to reinforce a point of view that comes from that specific case. The fact remains, however, that we cannot avoid the need for people to make a judgment in difficult circumstances. The doctor, the relative, or the person who must decide whether his or her moral responsibility is to assist another or to take a particular course of action, are the only people who can weigh all the facts and come to a judgment, balancing the sanctity of human life with the suffering and the personal wishes of the individual concerned. After the event, another judgment has to be made as to whether the individual involved broke the law, and whether there ought to be a prosecution. There was a case in my constituency of a mother who killed her severely disabled son. The public reporting of that case suggested to me that nothing was gained by the prosecution; it simply served to make even more painful, in public, the period of intense suffering that she experienced over a long period. We cannot legislate against that, but we can offer guidance on how a judgment should be made on whether to prosecute. That is what the Director of Public Prosecutions has done, and in my view he has got it right. This is an issue of judgment, which is absolutely crucial. I shall make a comparison with data protection. People often want a safe haven, which is expressed as ““If in doubt, don't share data””, when in fact there is a legal responsibility to consider the public interest and to balance the pros and cons of sharing specific data. A judgment has to be made in accordance with the law. Indeed, the law requires a judgment to be made. That is why we bring the balance of judgment required into a single judgment by talking about data management, rather than about data protection or data sharing. I hope that that helps to illustrate the fact that, in relation to assisted dying, to say ““Never prosecute”” or ““Always prosecute”” would be equally wrong. The motion does not seek to change the law, but the amendment would take us further down that road by suggesting that the guidance should be subject to a decision of Parliament. Surely the hidden agenda is that we could disapprove guidance in the future, or even require a change in the guidance by resolution. That would be wrong. I have had letters from people who believe that the guidance is already subject to Parliament, but it is not. Some have implied that passing this motion would make subsequent changes to the guidance subject to Parliament, but that would be wrong. The guidance tells prosecutors how they should seek to make an appropriate judgment within the law, and we should not interfere with that. If we wanted to change the law, that would be a matter for Parliament, but the interpretation of the law is something that we should note—perhaps with approval, as the motion does—but not seek to determine. Let us leave it there. On both sides of the argument about whether we should go further or be more restrictive, people argue from a point of view of compassion, and I respect the opinions on both sides. Newspapers and hon. Members who are dealing with individual cases argue for compassion for an individual in a particular set of circumstances, but our laws have to be universal and they therefore have to allow room for compassion and for the protection of the vulnerable. That means that the law should not be too specific or inflexible. I believe that the courts have been right in reflecting the decisions of this House on what the law should be. I also believe that the Director of Public Prosecutions, in responding to the pressure on him to produce guidance, has got it right within the law. I am happy to support the motion, and to endorse the policy set out by the Director of Public Prosecutions. The present policy appropriately protects those who want to act out of compassion in helping the terminally ill while safeguarding against the dangerous prospect of legalising assisted dying or putting pressure on the ill and the vulnerable.