SCA to say if it will enforce ruling to allow assisted suicide in the terminally ill
The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) will this week consider whether to enforce a legal ruling that would see the country becoming the eighth nation to allow the terminally ill to be assisted to die, in a cause that has been publicly backed by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. The SCA will consider an appeal on Friday by the Department of Health after a High Court ruling last year allowing Robin Stransham-Ford to die with the assistance of a doctor. Stransham-Ford died naturally on the same day of the ruling. "The state is imposing this prohibition," Bonita Meyersfeld, the director of the Centre For Applied Legal Studies, which has been allowed to submit arguments in the case supporting the right to die, said at a media conference in Johannesburg on Monday. "The options left to a person in this situation [are] unbearable suffering or suicide." If the appeal is dismissed, the health department can take the case to the Constitutional Court as a final step. Failure to overturn the ruling ...
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