Department of justice to appeal right to die ruling

Cape Town resident Robin Stransham-Ford can ask a doctor to help him die quietly in his bed with his former partner and young daughter with him.

Judge Hans Fabricius on Thursday morning ruled the doctor who helped him die or provided him with lethal drugs so he could help himself would not face criminal sanction or the threat of losing his medical licence from the Health Professions Council of SA.

He found Stransham-Ford to be mentally sound and facing a "severely curtailed life" as he expected to die from terminal prostate cancer within weeks or days.

He also said it was clear that Stransham-Ford had voluntarily approached the court and was under no duress from others to end his life.

Stransham-Ford approached the court last Tuesday with an urgent application that he be allowed to die as he found wasting away from cancer and being in pain "undignified".

He contended that his constitutional rights to dignity were being breached.

Fabricius ruled that the order only applied to Stransham-Ford and only the doctor who helped him would not be acting unlawfully‚ and no doctor was obliged to help him.

Other terminal patients would have to approach the courts themselves.

Fabricius’s order stated that the Constitutional rights to dignity as well as bodily and psychological integrity were at odds with the law that holds a doctor who helps with assisted suicide guilty of murder or culpable homicide.

Spokesperson for the justice department Mthunzi Mhaga said the state would appeal the ruling on Monday afternoon after the judge issued his reasons for the order.

He said it was a "precedent-setting ruling that could open the floodgates for all other terminal patients who wanted assisted suicide to approach the courts" and the state was "extremely disappointed" by it.

He complained that the court was curtailing the director of public prosecutions from charging a doctor who gave Stransham-Ford a lethal injection with murder.

Dignity SA's Willem Landman praised the ruling as precedent setting.

– The Times, RDM News Wire