Suicide Act 1961
Act of Parliament | |
Repeals/revokes | Interments (felo de se) Act 1882 |
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Amended by | |
Status: Amended | |
Text of statute as originally enacted | |
Text of the Suicide Act 1961 as in force today (including any amendments) within the United Kingdom, from legislation.gov.uk. |
The Suicide Act 1961 (
The text of sections 1 and 2 of this Act was enacted verbatim for Northern Ireland by sections 12 and 13 of the Criminal Justice Act (Northern Ireland) 1966.
Analysis
Suicide is defined as the act of intentionally ending one's own life. Before the Suicide Act 1961, it was a crime to die by suicide, and anyone who attempted and survived could be prosecuted and imprisoned, while the families of those who died could also potentially be prosecuted. In part, that criminalization reflected religious and moral objections to suicide as self-murder. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had formulated the view that whoever deliberately took away the life given to them by their Creator showed the utmost disregard for the will and authority of God and jeopardized their salvation, encouraging the Church to treat suicide as a sin. By the early 1960s, however, the Church of England was re-evaluating its stance on the legality of suicide, and decided that counselling, psychotherapy and suicide prevention intervention before the event took place would be a better solution than criminalisation of what amounted to an act of despair in this context.[2]
Sir Charles Fletcher-Cooke was the principal figure behind the emergence, introduction and passage of this legislation. Before it was introduced in July 1961, Fletcher-Cooke had been unsuccessfully trying to introduce such a bill for the decriminalisation of suicide for over a decade beforehand. While Home Secretary Rab Butler supported the bill, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan did not. In the event, the bill passed into law easily, decriminalising suicide, but creating an offence of "assisting, aiding or abetting suicide", which later became a pivotal clause for future debates about voluntary euthanasia several decades later.[3]
The Suicide Act was, however, a significant piece of legislation for, while section 1 treated the previous legal rule that suicide is a crime as "abrogated", section 2(1) stated:
A person who aids, abets, counsels or procures the suicide of another, or attempt by another to commit suicide shall be liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
This created a new offence of "complicity in suicide", but the effect is unparalleled in this branch of the law because there is no other instance in which an
(a) will necessarily amount to or involve the commission of any offence or offences by one or more of the parties to the agreement...
No offence will necessarily be committed by the suicide victim if the agreement is carried out, but the fact that it is legally impossible to commit the crime of suicide is irrelevant under the Criminal Attempts Act 1982.
Human Rights Act 1998
The first
- 1. Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No-one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.
This direct challenge to the legislation sought to assert an individual's right of autonomy against
See also
References
- Smartt, Ursula (2009). "Euthanasia and the Law". Criminal Law & Justice Weekly. 173 (7): 100.
External links
- The full text of Suicide Act, 1961 at Wikisource
- The Suicide Act 1961, as amended from the National Archives.