Suicide’s not a crime – instead we persecute the helpers

It’s not a question of if people win the right to end their own lives. It’s purely a matter of when. The difficulty, of course, is predicting when that will be.

You see, we have that exit freedom now. Suicide ceased to be a criminal offence in the UK in 1961 so the law, in its wisdom, finally stopped jailing those poor, desperate souls who tried to end it all, but failed.

Instead, at the same time as decriminalising suicide, the UK introduced the offence of ‘assisting, aiding or abetting suicide’ and I assume it’s this that Home Affairs’ Mary Lowe referred to the other day in expressing the very real difficulties that lie ahead if Guernsey does subsequently allow assisted dying.

As things stand, if your loved one was UK-born and you helped them achieve their last wish – a death at a time and manner of their choosing and free from pain and degrading deterioration – Britain’s Old Bill could hunt you down and, on conviction, bang you up for a total of 14 years.

Same goes for your GP, which is why the British Medical Association is a mite chary of the current debate. My hunch, however, is that many GPs would be quite happy to help in this regard. I base that on conversations in the past when families were assured that so and so wouldn’t suffer and if the final dose became an overdose…

Many of us have had experience of such discussions. Many families have reason to be grateful for them. But they were in pre-Shipman days. Trust and risk appetites are much diminished, which is why we are in the slightly surreal territory of discussing significant, emotional, intensely personal and tragic matters with words like ‘…wouldn’t treat a dog…’etc.

In some respects, this use of otherwise inappropriate language is a measure of the frustration those affected feel that appropriate end-of-life treatments aren’t available and why those using Dignitas risk going sooner than necessary so no one in their family is hounded for ‘assisting, aiding or abetting’ their final and documented wish.

It also reflects that the UK law in this respect is flawed. Suicide isn’t a crime, while helping might be. So being found guilty of complicity in suicide means risking jail for something that isn’t a criminal offence.

Yes, I’m confused too, yet we dance on the head of a pin largely thanks to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who came up with the view that anyone who self-murdered was disrespectful to God, who had issued that life in the first place, and therefore risked eternal damnation.

I make no comment on that other than we now know from the Pope’s reported remarks the other week that ‘Hell’ is not an everlasting fiery furnace for sinners but a disappearance, a ceasing to be. Which is, of course, all those seeking assisted dying want.

Anyway, at this stage I wanted to introduce the Lt-Governor, Vice Admiral Sir Ian Corder. You see, he made some very powerful and under-reported comments earlier this year ‘to take very great care of our position as a Crown Dependency’, something that we can look at a little later.

However, he used the telling expression ‘resource-heavy policy heavy-lifting’ being provided by the UK in all sorts of areas to our benefit. And while I may have a view on assisted dying, I do not under-estimate the many ethical, religious, practical, moral or legal objections that there might be towards it.

In short, does Guernsey have the lifting capability available to steer us through such a maze?

Home Affairs’ Deputy Lowe referred obliquely to this I think in her comments last month about the UK and the need for it, too, to change its laws.

In other words, if Guernsey was to pass primary legislation enabling assisted dying, would it get through the Privy Council and receive Royal Assent?

Well, the Ministry of Justice has already praised the competency of the Law Officers here and suggested less pure third-party scrutiny of what the island legislates is required. Equally, would the Privy Council really want to ban the island from introducing measures deemed appropriate by its Assembly and which its population deemed desirable?

No, I have no inside steer on that but assisted dying is a bigger issue in the UK than here because it is far more driven by headlines and raw emotion. It is a growing problem to be resolved and not an easy one for politicians, especially as more and more people identify with the ‘not even a dog…’ argument, even if they haven’t necessarily thought through the other aspects.

So personally, I can see much to be said for a Crown Dependency being in the vanguard of policy determination with the UK to one side. After all, Her Majesty’s Government knows it has to address the subject at some stage – why not let Guernsey take the heat as society makes the difficult journey towards facilitating assisted dying?

THANKS to the Jersey Evening Post, I shared a page with the Dean of Guernsey, the Very Rev. Tim Barker, when they used his comments and my previous column to illustrate the two sides of the assisted dying debate.

Or did it?

I was much taken with his remarks about palliative care and, especially, ‘I think this is the opportunity in the debate to think very seriously about the value we place on all human beings and what it means to live and die well’.

That places us firmly on the same page.