The Court declared inter alia as follows: the Applicant is a mentally competent adult; has freely and voluntarily, and without undue influence requested the Court to authorize that he be assisted in an act of suicide; is terminally ill and suffering intractably and has a severely curtailed life expectancy of some weeks only; is entitled to be assisted by a qualified medical doctor, who is willing to do so, to end his life, either by administration of a lethal agent or by providing the Applicant with the necessary lethal agent to administer himself; No medical doctor is obliged to accede to the request of the Applicant and the medical doctor who accedes to the request of the Applicant shall not be acting unlawfully, and hence, shall not be subject to prosecution or subject to disciplinary proceedings for assisting the Applicant.
Stransham-Ford v Minister of Justice And Correctional Services and Others (27401/15) [2015] ZAGPPHC 230 (4 May 2015) per Fabricius J.
The full declaratory order
-
Accordingly, on 30 April 2015, I made the following order:
-
IT IS DECLARED THAT:
1.1 The Applicant is a mentally competent adult;
1.2 The Applicant has freely and voluntarily, and without undue influence requested the Court to authorize that he be assisted in an act of suicide;
1.3 The Applicant is terminally ill and suffering intractably and has a severely curtailed life expectancy of some weeks only;
1.4 The Applicant is entitled to be assisted by a qualified medical doctor, who is willing to do so, to end his life, either by administration of a lethal agent or by providing the Applicant with the necessary lethal agent to administer himself;
1.5 No medical doctor is obliged to accede to the request of the Applicant;
1.6 The medical doctor who accedes to the request of the Applicant shall not be acting unlawfully, and hence, shall not be subject to prosecution by the Fourth Respondent or subject to disciplinary proceedings by the Third Respondent for assisting the Applicant.
-
This order shall not be read as endorsing the proposals of the draft Bill on End of Life as contained in the Law Commission Report of November 1998 (Project 86) as laying down the necessary or only conditions for the entitlement to the assistance of a qualified medical doctor to commit suicide.
-
The common law crimes of murder or culpable homicide in the context of assisted suicide by medical practitioners, insofar as they provide for an absolute prohibition, unjustifiably limit the Applicant’s constitutional rights to human dignity, (S. 10) and freedom to bodily and psychological integrity (S. 12 (2) (b), read with S. 1 and 7), and to that extent are declared to be overbroad and in conflict with the said provisions of the Bill of Rights.
-
Except as stipulated above, the common law crimes of murder and culpable homicide in the context of assisted suicide by medical practitioners are not affected.
Reported
2015 (6) BCLR 737 (HC)
[2015] JOL 33172 (HC)
Physician assisted euthanasia and suicide considered
The SCA allowed the appeal and set aside the order of Fabricius J in the high court. An advocate suffering in the terminal stages of cancer applied for an order to allow a medical practitioner to administer a lethal agent at his request, or provide him with a lethal agent that he could administer himself. He died before the high court granted the order which meant that his claim ceased to exist. The high court should have recalled its order. The law in relation to physician administered euthanasia (PAE) and physician assisted suicide (PAS) considered in detail. Decided that this was not an appropriate case in which to develop the common law of murder and culpable homicide.
Minister of Justice and Correctional Services v Estate Late James Stransham-Ford (531/2015) [2016] ZASCA 197 (6 December 2016) per Wallis JA (Lewis, Seriti and Dambuza JJA and Schippers AJA concurring)