In a significant open letter to the Observer, nearly 50 leading "teachers and practitioners of law" including 15 KCs expressed:

"Serious misgivings about the proposal to legalise physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill… The law reports are littered with cases of undue influence and duress, and legalisation would inevitably expose the most vulnerable to that risk."

'Other jurisdictions show both the difficulty of drafting effective legal safeguards and the tendency of such laws to expand… [with constraints] being criticised as "barriers to access..." Such limitations in a UK law would be challenged in court as unjustly discriminatory.'

'However well-intentioned the movers of the bill, we believe the UK would, sooner or later, follow other jurisdictions down the slippery slope. Nor should the involvement of high court judges be seen as a panacea, not least because our justice system is already under immense pressure... We urge MPs to resist this change.'

Lawyers have a key role in this debate — bills must be drafted carefully, and laws must be made to function — and since that letter was published, Philip Murray, an Assistant Professor in Law at Cambridge, has written:

"I don't believe the Bill's likely safeguards can be anywhere near as watertight as is promised. As such, there can be no guarantees that any assisted suicide law passed by Parliament will not expand in the future. The slippery slope is a legal reality, not a fiction invented by the Bill's opponents."

Assisted suicide engages several Convention (European Convention on Human Rights - ECHR) rights, principally article 8 (respect for private and family life), article 2 (life) and article 3 (prohibition on torture inhuman or degrading treatment), but:

'While Strasbourg seems content to accept blanket bans on assisted suicide, any limited assisted suicide law that discriminates on grounds of disabilities, medical conditions, etc. is liable to attract the closest scrutiny under article 14.'

'Once a blanket ban is lifted and assisted suicide is permitted for certain groups and not others, the force of any argument that exclusions from the law are necessary for the protection of vulnerable people becomes inherently weakened.'

"A symbolic rubber stamp"

Reports indicate that Kim Leadbeater, like Lord Falconer and Baroness Meacher before her, will stipulate that requests must be approved by High Court Judges as well as doctors, and activists refer to this as a self-evident strength. Such judges have called this into question. Former High Court judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn "argues that the judge will be no more than a symbolic rubber stamp," while Sir James Munby has concluded:

"It is, I believe, important for me, as a retired judge and former President of the Family Division [of the High Court], and for the benefit of the vital public debate on this very anxious topic, to make some points… [on] the proposal that there should be judicial involvement in the process. This will be problematic, to put it mildly."

"The Falconer Bill is wholly silent as to the process and procedures which are to apply to this novel jurisdiction. This is a major omission."

Sir James identified listed "some obvious and vitally important questions":

"Some may say: these are all technical points which can appropriately be left for rules of court, or for guidance to be issued by the President of the Family Division, or, indeed, left to be decided on a case-by-case basis. I strongly disagree. The process and procedures by which such a novel and anxious jurisdiction is to be exercised will be fundamental to the integrity and efficacy of the scheme. They will be crucial to the confidence which those directly involved and, more generally, society and the public at large must have if the scheme is not to sink into discredit and worse. These are matters on which Parliament must make its intentions plain."

56% of those who expressed an opinion to pollsters in June said they sympathised with a change in the law in principle, but didn't think it could be safely implemented. With the courts system already over-burdened, the role of judges wholly undefined, and any diagnostic restriction ripe for a legal challenge under the ECHR, MPs should not stand for activists telling them just trust us, we'll sort it out later. They must reject this bill.

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