Member

Amendment 108 addresses an even clearer category of vulnerability. It seeks to provide that a person who is already deprived of liberty under the Mental Capacity Act, subject to guardianship, community treatment, hospital regimes or a welfare order, should be conclusively regarded as lacking capacity for the purposes of assisted dying. These are not marginal cases. Deprivation of liberty safeguards exist precisely because the person is not free and because the state recognises that they have a heightened vulnerability. These are certainly issues that we have discussed on a previous Friday. To allow someone who is detained, constrained or subject to welfare orders to request a state-assisted death would be a profound contradiction. It would collapse the distinction between protection and permission.