Patricia Hewitt the ex-Health Secretary has put forward a motion for MPs to debate a change to the law that would allow people to legally take others abroad to die.
The motion is not expected to succeed. I think that’s unfortunate. We need European cohesion on this subject, because at the moment we’re in the utterly absurd situation that you cannot have a legally assissted suicide here in the UK, but you can if you travel abroad to Switzerland. So for some reason the price of a plane ticket makes the difference.
Then we have the further problem that technically anyone helping out by taking, say, a loved one to a foreign country to die, could then face prosecution back here. Yet the CPS have brought no such prosecutrions. Hewitt’s motion would sort this out, and yet sadly it is doomed to fail under the nonsense spouted by the anti-Euthanesea crowd. So unfortunately it looks like we still will not get any clarity over this, and people finding themselves in this position in the future will continue to have to take a legally hazy chance to help out their loved ones.
