Recent news has not been good news for those people who want to see euthanasia and assisted suicide legalised in the UK.Cases of euthanasia in the Netherlands have increased by 13 per cent in the past year, prompting the health ministry there to open an inquiry. In Belgium, where euthanasia is also legal, provided it is carried out by a doctor and with the patient's consent, 120 nurses admitted to researchers that they had taken part in euthanasia where patients had not asked for their lives to be ended.
Large numbers of urns containing human ashes were found dumped in a lake near the Swiss suicide facility Dignitas, where British people have gone for assisted suicide. A former employee said for Dignitas to dump human ashes there was common practice. Dignitas is under investigation for allegedly ignoring the mental condition of a patient - a paranoid schizophrenic - in helping him to die.
And an investigation by a Swiss publication has suggested that the assisted suicide business has made Dignitas' founder, Ludwig Minelli, a millionaire. He apparently claimed to have no taxable personal fortune in 1998, when Dignitas began, but was worth more than £1 million by 2007. Mr Minelli denied any wrongdoing.
In the UK, euthanasia and assisted suicide remain illegal, though it looks like prosecutions are increasingly less likely.
Michael Irwin, a former chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and a former GP, is said to have helped at least eight people to die. He was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council in 2005. He wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, admitting he had travelled to the Dignitas clinic with cancer patient Raymond Cutkelvin and paid £1,500 towards the cost of Mr Cutkelvin's death, and inviting the DPP to prosecute. He is not, however, to stand trial.
Despite the fact that there is sufficient evidence for a case, Mr Starmer says it would not be in the public interest to prosecute, evidently because the case does not fulfil enough of the criteria he has published under which cases will be brought.
Dr Peter Saunders, of Care Not Killing, writes on his blog: "This sort of 'legal sanction' is exactly what first happened in the Netherlands and led to an eventual change in the law in that country - legalisation by stealth."
The danger in the UK at this time, it seems, is not that the law will be changed, but that the law will be ignored.
