New Zealand rejects bid to legalize euthanasia
Print Edition
NEW Zealand’s High Court yesterday refused a bid by a brain cancer patient to allow doctors to assist terminally ill patients to end their lives just hours after the applicant died.
Lawyer Lecretia Seales, 42, had asked the court to declare that she had a right to end her own life and that her doctor should not be prosecuted for helping her.
“The complex legal, philosophical, moral and clinical issues raised by Ms Seales’s proceedings can only be addressed by parliament passing legislation,” Judge David Collins said in a written judgement.
Seales died of natural causes about 15 hours before the decision was formally released, but a summary of the decision had been given to her the previous day.
She had claimed the denial of her right to an assisted death breached her fundamental civil and legal rights.
“The judgment has starkly highlighted that the status quo is not ideal; that people are at risk of intolerable suffering and are at risk of ending their lives earlier than they would otherwise,” said Seales’s husband, Matt Vickers.
New Zealand’s top state lawyer, the solicitor general, argued that only lawmakers had the right to make and change law.
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