Legal Concerns

This Bill will dramatically and fundamentally change the role of judges in England and Wales.

Currently judges can rule on end-of-life cases, but their powers extended only to authorising the withdrawal of treatment, not the administration of treatment intended to cause death.

Legal professionals have expressed concerns over the viability of a proposed ‘safeguard” which requires judicial oversight of each assisted suicide application.

Where is this money for all this extra work going to come from? Who is going to pay for it?

There could be thousands of applications for assisted suicide to the Family Court every year.

Each case will require significant legal time to be considered but there are only 20 full-time judges in the Family Division and they are under huge pressure already.
Where are all the extra judges that we would need going to come from?

This has bewildered the legal profession, with a senior judge, Sir James Mumby (a former president of the Family Division) querying, “Is this a proper function for the judges? Is this truly a judicial function at all?”