It would provide more certainty than we are looking at in the bill. I will give an example of what I mean about some of the tensions in the bill. As the earlier panel said, there is no definition of assisted suicide or assisting a suicide. I understand that the intention is to give as much flexibility as possible but, when we look at the interplay between that intention and section 18, which says that
“Nothing in this Act authorises anyone to do anything that itself causes another person’s death”,
that demonstrates to me that everything has to be looked at and dealt with in its own context. Various definitions could be brought to that.
What is something that itself causes suicide? I take the intention to be, for example, directly causing someone to ingest medication that they might be using, but the bill is not entirely clear that that is what is intended. Together with the lack of definition of what it is to assist suicide, that still means from my perspective as a prosecutor that there is perhaps a lack of clarity and that discretionary judgments would have to be made.
The thing to emphasise about the bill, as with the current law, is that I am sure that the cases would be very fact sensitive. The specific facts of any case would be important. However, the way in which the bill is set out does not provide a framework for what is and is not criminal. There is still an extent to which that has to be read into the provisions.
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