Law must safeguard everyone
Of all the decisions judges have to make, the most difficult must be of the type they made when they heard the case of retired college lecturer Noel Conway of Shrewsbury.
For this was, very literally, a matter of life or death. Mr Conway, who is 67, has motor neurone disease. He is fighting, not for his life, but for his death. He wants to die in peace and with dignity, and at a time when he is still mentally competent to make that choice.
In taking his case to the High Court he was acting with honourable and noble motives, recognised by the judges themselves, who expressed their deep sympathy.
But their sympathy did not extend as far as facilitating his wish to die. They put a block on the case proceeding further.
At issue is the current legal ban on helping somebody to die, and what many believe is the right to die. Here is a collision of moral outlook in which modern society is grappling for the correct, proper, and acceptable path. There is much moral force which can be brought to bear on both sides of the argument.
For the court it was not some academic or abstract debating point, but immediate and real, in the form of a Shropshire man with an incurable degenerative condition seeking to be treated in a manner respecting his considered wishes to have an assisted death.
In denying him, there will be some who will think the judges have been cruel and unmerciful, although their comments do not bear that out.
Mr Conway is fighting on. Yet even if he is ultimately successful, it looks like it will take so long to effect the legal change that it will be too late for him, and it will be others who will reap the benefit from his campaigning.
The difficulty in fashioning a workable law is that it has to be appropriate not just to one heartbreaking set of circumstances, but to all similar ones. While Mr Conway is a man of intelligence who knows his own mind, that is a safeguard which will be degraded with the more emotionally or intellectually vulnerable, and so the law has to be framed in such a way as to be a safeguard in itself.
Mr Conway is a standard bearer for a cause. Whether people support him, do not support him, or cannot decide, there can be agreement that he has acted with courage and principle and is raising one of the most fundamental issues to tax the best brains of humanity.
