MPs scrap judge sign-off in assisted dying bill

The request for a High Court justice to o.k. assisted dying applications has been dropped by the committee considering the bill.

The clause had been heralded by the bill's supporters arsenic a safeguard that made it the strictest specified authorities successful the world.

But the Ministry of Justice and elder judges raised concerns astir the interaction connected the courts.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who is bringing the bill, suggested replacing the relation of High Court judges with a three-person sheet featuring a elder ineligible figure, a psychiatrist and a societal idiosyncratic to reappraisal applications.

The committee is expected to insert those details astatine a aboriginal stage.

After the measure committee voted 15 to 7 successful favour of dropping the High Court judge's role, Leadbeater said the alteration would marque the instrumentality "even much robust".

"And it is overmuch safer than the existent prohibition connected assisted dying, which leaves terminally sick radical and their families without immoderate specified protections astatine all," she said.

"I person been encouraged that successful the people of this statement determination person been affirmative responses to the connection for a commissioner and a multi-disciplinary sheet from colleagues crossed the committee, careless of however they voted astatine [its] 2nd reading.

"That tells maine that immoderate our views connected the Bill itself, determination is simply a shared committedness to getting protections for terminally sick adults right. That means we are doing our job."

However a radical of 26 of her chap Labour MPs warned that scrapping the High Court's oversight "breaks the promises made by proponents of the bill, fundamentally weakens the protections for the susceptible and shows conscionable however haphazard this full process has become".

In a statement, the radical - made up astir wholly of MPs who voted against the measure astatine 2nd speechmaking - said: "It does not summation judicial safeguards but alternatively creates an unaccountable quango and to assertion different misrepresents what is being proposed."