SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENT DRAGS ITS FEET ON LEGALISING ASSISTED SUICIDE

MAVERICK CITIZEN OP-ED South African Government drags its feet on legalising assisted suicide By Drew Forrest• 11 July 2021

(Photo: lboro.ac.uk / Wikipedia)

Twenty-two years ago the Law Commission called for Parliament to investigate euthanasia and assisted suicide. Nothing has happened since — in fact, the government seems intent on blocking progress. Drew Forrest reports on South Africa’s continued denial of ‘the last right’.

Drew Forrest has been working as a journalist for 40 years, with stints at Business Day, Mail & Guardian, Times of Swaziland and the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism. He has been a deputy editor, political editor, business editor and labour editor, among other positions. Author of a book on cricket, The Pacemen (Pan Macmillan 2013), he has also edited several non-fiction books. He is the managing partner (editorial) of IJ Hub, a regional training offshoot of amaBhungane.

A university professor cleaning toilets in government offices? Sounds like Mao’s Cultural Revolution! It couldn’t happen here, with our world-class judiciary and democratic constitution…

Oh, yes it could. It is precisely the situation of Sean Davison, who works at the University of the Western Cape.

Right to die activist Sean Davison during his 2019 murder trial in Cape Town. (Photo by Gallo Images / Netwerk24 / Jaco Marais)

According to his friend and colleague Lee Last, Davison travels every Monday morning to the correctional services department building in Cape Town, where for four hours he cleans toilets, empties rubbish bins and mops floors.

Davison has served 400 hours of a community service sentence imposed in a plea bargain in 2019. As he is under three-year house arrest, he can leave home only to scrub toilets and go to work.

His crime? Out of pity, he assisted in the suicide of three friends desperate to head off intolerably painful or humiliating deaths. They begged him to apply his expertise as a biotechnologist; their families pleaded for him not to be jailed.

“He’s taken the sentence in his stride, he’s got no complaints,” said Last. “He’d much rather clean toilets than rot in jail.” Indeed, the judge could have given him three life sentences for murder.

For decades, suicide has not been a crime in South Africa. But paradoxically, helping someone do it, even with the best of motives, is murder under the common law.

Davison refused to be interviewed, saying his sentence bars contact with the media. But it certainly looks as if he is being vindictively demeaned. Why is this highly qualified scientist not teaching maths and science to schoolchildren in Khayelitsha?

The criminalisation of the morally upright was one of the most objectionable features of apartheid, and an unambiguous call for the law to change.

There are other signs that the government is waging an undeclared war on assisted dying.

As soon as a citizen asks the courts to sanction physician-assisted suicide (where the doctor supplies the means but the patient does the deed) or physician-administered euthanasia, it springs into action, splashing out scarce public resources on a legal counter-attack.

This is in marked contrast with the rest of the democratic world, which is moving in the opposite direction (see sidebar).

In a case currently before the North Gauteng High Court, Dieter Harck and Sue Walter are seeking the legal right to choose assisted dying when their illnesses become unendurable. Harck has motor neuron disease, which could eventually suffocate him and Walters has terminal cancer.

In response, the justice minister, Ronald Lamola, has briefed expensive advocates to oppose their plea (Harck and Walters’ lawyers are acting pro deo).

In 2015 his predecessor, Michael Masutha, opposed a similar application by advocate Robert Stransham-Ford, who was dying, excruciatingly, from prostate cancer. Masutha lost in the high court, but instantly went on appeal. This time he got his way, principally because Stransham-Ford died just before the ruling (see a report on the ruling here and the judgment here).

A member of lobby group Dignity SA, Professor Willem Landman, took aim at the appeal court’s “technical” judgment, saying there had been insufficient activist engagement with the vital human rights and constitutional implications of the case.

Constitutional rights at stake

Harck and Walter’s plea is about far more than personal suffering; they argue that the constitutional rights to dignity and self-determination mean they should be able to choose when and how to die.

The Constitution requires the law to be reshaped in questions such as same-sex unions and abortion. But from assisted dying the government seems to shrink in atavistic horror.

In 1997, President Nelson Mandela asked the SA Law Reform Commission to explore a range of end-of-life issues, including euthanasia and assisted suicide. The commission recommended three options: keep the status quo; legalise and let hospital ethics committees decide; or make the decision a private matter between patient and doctor.

It also wrote draft legislation, which it handed to former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

The commission’s report and draft law were never tabled in Parliament. There have been no public hearings, as there were on abortion. Nothing has happened on what some call “the last right” for 20 years.

Why?

Tshabalala-Msimang may have dropped a hint when she allegedly branded assisted dying “medicine for the rich”. Given that an overdose of barbiturates is far cheaper than protracted end-of-life care, this makes no sense. Was she saying, in code, that this is a concern only for white South Africans? There was a further pointer in a televised debate between Landman and former health minister Aaron Motsoaledi, when the latter insisted euthanasia “is against our [presumably African] culture”. “Culture” is a slippery term: South Africa accepts same-sex unions; Uganda punishes gay sex with a 14-year jail sentence. Which is the authentic champion of “the African way”? Everyone, regardless of colour, dies — often miserably. And not all Africans agree that their culture prohibits medical curtailment of life in all cases. One of Davison’s most steadfast supporters has been that global standard-bearer for compassionate faith, Desmond Tutu, who is known to support assisted dying both personally and theologically, as the will of a merciful God. Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach) Another influential black voice, SA Human Rights Commission head Tseliso Thipanyane, has publicly proclaimed that the constitutional rights of dignity and “of every individual to control of his or her own body” are a clear basis for euthanasia or assisted suicide. Landman believes there is far more support among black South Africans than the government realises, and that a referendum along New Zealand lines might show this. But the crisp point is that South Africa is a Rechtsstaat: it is the Constitution, not this or that culture, that must decide. For some, the termination of pregnancy, civil unions and the abolition of capital punishment are anathema. But by creating “an overarching legal community”, the Constitution makes it possible to press ahead with such reforms. Landman said he put this to Motsoaledi, who did not reply. Daily Maverick also put questions to justice ministry spokesperson Crispin Phiri, who acknowledged receipt, but provided no answers.

Tutu’s stance underlines the point that religious opposition is not automatic: it is the shibboleth mainly of hardline Catholics and evangelical Protestants, who also shudder at abortion. Of eight US states that allow assisted suicide, not one is in the “Rapture-ready” Deep South. In fact, most objections seem to start with amorphous religious-cultural emotion, which then casts about for rational support. And to spare tender consciences, we move into a realm of contorted hair-splitting and casuistry where moral distinctions are gossamer-thin. It is legal in South Africa to withdraw or withhold life support where the patient has given an advance directive or further treatment is futile. This is known as a living will. “Palliative sedation”, through increasing doses of pain-killing drugs that may hasten death, is also allowed. So is “terminal sedation”, where a pain-stricken patient is knocked out and, if life support is withdrawn, may starve to death. What, in reality, is the difference between euthanasia and death via an incremental morphine overdose? Or by pulling the plug? Either way, the doctor precipitates the end of life. Some question why the terminally ill don’t take their own lives, rather than asking a doctor to do it for them. What if the patient is physically incapable, fearful or lacks the know-how? More to the point: why should the terminally ill not exercise their constitutional right to a peaceful and dignified death, with a doctor at hand and their family members around them? The mainstay of the opposition case is the “slippery slope” argument, which holds that voluntary euthanasia can weaken judicial restraints, paving the way for involuntary killings à la Third Reich. The Netherlands as a model Wherever it is legal, assisted dying is highly regulated. The Netherlands sets five statutory conditions: hopeless and unbearable suffering; a fully voluntary patient request (mandatory parental consent for children); the patient understands his/her illness and options; consultation with a second physician; and a suitable medical procedure administered or overseen by a doctor. Classed as unnatural, the death then passes to a review committee, which refers errant doctors to the prosecuting authorities. There is a clear dividing line between Dutch and Nazi euthanasia — the patient’s informed and explicit consent. Why, logically, does that have to slide towards coercion? Facilitated dying has been lawful in the Netherlands for 37 years and entrenched in statute since 2002. In 2017 the five review committees reported that nine doctors (0.3%) were referred to the authorities after 3,136 assisted deaths that year, mainly because a second physician was not consulted. A 2009 study found there had been no rise in involuntary deaths over two decades and no increase among the aged, poor, handicapped or ethnic minorities. Critics claim the Netherlands showcases the “slippery slope” in practice, as euthanasia numbers have climbed annually and the initial facility for terminal cases has expanded to include the mentally ill, demented and old people who feel their lives are “complete”. But these all require the same consent — in fact, researchers say Dutch doctors are increasingly guided by their patients. The real explanation is that the suicide taboo has faded over time, while more and more people are demanding self-determination in the supremely personal matter of their own death. Assisted dying in any form is banned throughout Africa, but South Africa does not have to march in lockstep. Why not blaze a constitutional trail, as on gay rights and other contentious issues? The state’s obstructive rearguard action is both inhumane and pointless. “Sooner or later they’ll have to confront the tension between the common law and the Constitution,” said a source familiar with the Harck case. “They can chop off the dragon’s head, but there’ll be another… and another…” International trends From a tiny spring in Switzerland during World War 2, assisted dying has grown into a broadening international current. For two decades a destination for “suicide tourism” by foreigners, Switzerland was joined by the Netherlands in the mid-80s. The trend is clear: in the United States physician-assisted suicide (PAS) was legalised first in Oregon (1994), then in Washington state (2008), de facto in Montana (2009), in Vermont (2013), California (2015), Colorado (2016), District of Colombia (2016), Hawaii (2018) and New Jersey (2018). Social democracies lead the way: euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and Canada. PAS is allowed in Austria and is under active discussion in Germany, Portugal and Italy. Like Switzerland, Croatia permits it for “unselfish motives”. Euthanasia is permitted in Colombia and has been debated in parliaments across South America. PAS was recently approved by New Zealand and the Australian states of Victoria, South Australia, West Australia and Tasmania. DM/MC

'I CAN BE MY WHOLE SELF': AUSTRALIA'S ONLY LGBTIQ PRIDE CENTRE OPENS

Sumeyya Ilanbey
By Sumeyya Ilanbey
11 July 2021

Hang was seven years old when she arrived in Australia with her family in 1978, part of the first wave of Vietnamese boat people seeking asylum.

For much of her life, she said, she worked hard to fit in. She perfected her English, lest her accent gave her away as a refugee.

Premier Daniel Andrews with Hang Vo at St Kilda at the Victorian Pride Centre raising the flag on Sunday. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

She spun yarns of family summer camping trips, even though her parents and the three eldest children had in fact been working seven days a week to make ends meets.

She concocted elaborate stories about her Christmas celebrations, despite being Buddhi,n a board in an executive team,” Ms Vo said.

Melbourne's LGBTIQ community will take part in the annual Midsumma pride march on Sunday

“I became really good at fitting in ... [but] I also learnt fitting in eroded the sense of who I am. Here, at the Pride Centre, I can be my whole self: all the parts of me are valued, celebrated, embraced.

“The whole of me is needed here.”

Ms Vo is chair of the Victorian Pride Centre on Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, which was officially opened on Sunday afternoon, making Victoria the home of Australia’s first purpose-built community hub for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, intersex and queer communities.

Premier Daniel Andrews marked the event by announcing $1.9 million to deliver Melbourne Pride 2021 – a one-day street party in the city’s inner north, to be held annually thereafter.

This year’s celebration will take place on December 5 to mark the 40-year anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between men in Victoria.

Equality Minister Martin Foley and Mr Andrews at an event to officially open the Victorian Pride Centre. Credit:Luis Ascui

“We can’t have enough of these events in our state – somewhat cheeky to announce a northern-suburbs event in the south, but we built the place and we can get away with it,” Mr Andrews said, tongue in cheek.

“To everyone who has had to hide, to everyone who has had to fear, to everyone who’s had to be not quite themselves, this is your space. Every space in Victoria is your space, because equality is not negotiable in this, the most progressive part of our nation.”

A range of LGBTIQ organisations, including Transgender Victoria, bookshop Hares and Hyenas and the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, as well as the Australian Queer Archives, will be based at the Victorian Pride Centre.

Port Philip City Council donated the land on which the centre is built, while the Victorian government spent more than $25 million on the facility.

BENNETT'S POLITICAL THEATRE: THE DECISIVE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN FIGHT AHEAD

2 July 2021
Bennett’s Political Theater: the Decisive Israeli-Palestinian Fight Ahead
by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Many Palestinians believe that the May 10-21 military confrontation between Israel and the Gaza Resistance, along with the simultaneous popular revolt across Palestine, was a game-changer. Israel is doing everything in its power to prove them wrong.

Palestinians are justified to hold this viewpoint; after all, their minuscule military capabilities in a besieged and impoverished tiny stretch of land, the Gaza Strip, have managed to push back – or at least neutralize – the massive and superior Israeli military machine.

However, for Palestinians, this is not only about firepower but also about their coveted national unity. Indeed, the Palestinian revolt, which included all Palestinians regardless of their political backgrounds or geographic locations, is fostering a whole new discourse on Palestine – non-factional, assertive and forward-thinking.

The challenge for the Palestinian people is whether they will be able to translate their achievements into an actual political strategy, and finally transition past the stifling, and often tragic, post-Oslo Accords period.

Of course, it will not be so easy. After all, there are powerful forces that are keenly invested in the status quo. For them, any positive change on the path of Palestinian freedom will certainly lead to political, strategic and economic losses.

The Palestinian Authority, which operates with no democratic mandate, is more aware of its vulnerable position than at any other time in the past. Not only do ordinary Palestinians have no faith in this ‘authority’, but they see it as an obstacle in their path for liberation. It was unsurprising to see PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, and many of his corrupt inner circle, riding the wave of Palestinian popular revolt, shifting their language entirely, though fleetingly, from a discourse that was carefully designed to win the approval of ‘donor countries’, to one singing the praises of ‘resistance’ and ‘revolution’.

This corrupt clique is desperate, eager to sustain its privileges and survive at any cost.

If Palestinians carry on with their popular mobilization and upward trajectory, however, Israel is the entity that stands to lose most. A long-term Palestinian popular Intifada, uprising, with specific demands and under a unified national leadership, would represent the greatest threat to Israel’s military occupation and apartheid regime in many years.

The Israeli government, this time under the inexperienced leadership of current Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, and his coalition partner, future Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, is clearly unable to articulate a post-Gaza war strategy. If the political raucous and the bizarre power transition from former Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, to Bennett’s coalition is momentarily ignored, it feels as if Netanyahu is still holding sway.

Bennett has, thus far, followed Netanyahu’s playbook on every matter concerning the Palestinians. He, and especially his Defense Minister, Benny Gantz – Netanyahu’s former coalition partner – continue to speak of their military triumph in Gaza and the need to build on this supposed ‘victory’. On June 15, the Israeli army bombed several locations in the besieged Strip and, again, on June 18. A few more bombs, however, are unlikely to change the outcome of the May war.

It is time to convert our “military achievements (to) political gains,” Gantz said on June 20. Easier said than done; as per this logic, Israel has been scoring ‘military achievements’ in Gaza for many years, namely since its first major war on the Strip in 2008-09. Since then, thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed and many more wounded. However, Palestinian resistance continued unabated and zero ‘political gains’ have actually been achieved.

Gantz, like Bennett and Lapid, recognizes that Israel’s strategy in Gaza has been a complete failure. Since their main objective is remaining in power, they are bound to the rules of the old game which were formulated by right-wing politicians and sustained by right-wing extremists. Any deviation from that failed stratagem means a possible collapse of their shaky coalition.

Instead of mapping out a new, realistic strategy, Israel’s new government is busy sending symbolic messages. The first message is to its main target audience, Israel’s right-wing constituency, particularly Netanyahu’s disgruntled supporters, that the new government is equally committed to Israel’s ‘security’, to ensuring a demographic majority in occupied Jerusalem as in the rest of Palestine, and that no Palestinian state will ever be realized.

Another message is to the Palestinians and, by extension, to the whole region whose peoples and governments rallied behind the Palestinian revolt during the May war, that Israel remains a formidable military force, and that the fundamental military equation on the ground remains unaltered.

By continuing its escalation in and around Gaza, its violent provocations in Sheikh Jarrah and the entirety of East Jerusalem, its continued restrictions on Gaza’s urgent need for reconstruction, Bennett’s coalition is engaging in political theater. As long as attention remains fixated on Gaza and Jerusalem, as long as Bennett and Lapid continue to buy time and to distract the Israeli public from an imminent political implosion.

The Palestinians are, once more, proving to be critical players in Israeli politics. After all, it was Palestinian unity and resolve in May that humiliated Netanyahu and emboldened his enemies to finally oust him. Now, the Palestinians could potentially hold the keys to the survival of Bennet’s coalition, especially if they agree to a prisoner exchange – freeing several Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinian groups in Gaza in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held under horrific conditions in Israel.

On the day of the last prisoner exchange, in October 2011, Netanyahu delivered a televised speech, carefully tailored to present himself as Israel’s savior. Bennett and Lapid would relish a similar opportunity.

It behooves Israel’s new leaders to exercise caution in how they proceed from this point on. Palestinians are proving that they are no longer pawns in Israel’s political circus and they, too, can play politics, as the past few weeks have testified.

So far, Bennett has proven to be another Netanyahu. Yet, if Israel’s longest-running prime minister ultimately failed to convince Israelis of the merit of his political doctrine, Bennett’s charade is likely to be exposed much sooner, and the price, this time, is sure to be even heavier.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net