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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 436 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

However, those same members concluded that to legalise assisted suicide would be an unwise and dangerous public policy. There are grounds for believing that decriminalising euthanasia would breach a number of major international human rights agreements. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, for example, states:

Everyone has the right to life, and that all are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

The UN 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states:

Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.

To pass a law that breaches that fundamental principle puts the relevant legislature, in my view, at risk of a formal challenge before the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, and I think we need to think on that a bit. The House of Lords committee heard evidence from a professor of law at Oxford University to this effect:

It would not be possible always to be totally confident that a request for euthanasia was truly voluntary and not the result of pressure or coercion.

Can we set that sort of comment aside lightly? All three inquiries found it was not possible to draft laws that would prevent negligence, for example, misdiagnosis, or to prevent the unscrupulous from killing the vulnerable and the weak. In its report, the House of Lords committee said:

To create an exception to the general prohibition of intentional killing would inevitably open the way to its further erosion, whether by design, by inadvertence, or by the human tendency to test the limits of any regulation. These dangers are such that we believe that any decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia would give rise to more, and more grave, problems than those it sought to redress.

Mr Speaker, without relying on any religious tenet, all three inquiries stressed the special worth of human life as forming the heart of civilised society. The House of Lords committee said:

It is the fundamental value on which all others are based and is the foundation of both law and medical practice. The intentional taking of life is therefore the offence that society condemns most strongly.

Note that the House of Lords committee is saying that society condemns it. The members of that committee did not single out religious condemnation. They perceive the blanket of condemnation as covering society as a whole, whether agnostics, atheists or religious people.

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