A bill that would allow people to help anyone suffering from a terminal illness end their lives could lead to 15,000 assisted suicides in the UK per year, a peer said today.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff's claim came as a House of Lords select committee heard evidence from the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, on the potential legal impact of the private members bill to reform Britain's euthanasia laws.
The assisted dying for the terminally ill bill, proposed by crossbench peer Lord Joffe, would allow a terminally ill adult to choose medical help to die, within strict safeguards.
Crossbench peer Baroness Finlay told the committee: "We have heard from the estimate Lord Joffe suggested that between 3% and 7% of people who will be potentially eligible under the bill would avail themselves of it.
"I make that about 15,000 deaths a year potentially, given the number of deaths in the UK."
Lord Goldsmith told the committee it would be inappropriate to publish the criteria that determined whether or not friends or relatives should be prosecuted under the Suicide Act for helping people to kill themselves, despite a string of recent high profile cases where they were not.
The attorney general said the director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, had decided he should not produce advanced guidance on the criteria that should apply in such cases. Instead he would continue to review cases as and when they were referred to him.
Lord Goldsmith replied: "The view has been taken by the director that (...) he should continue with the policy which he has taken reviewing the case presented to him and deciding whether the prosecution should be brought or not.
"Part of the reason for that is it would be inappropriate for him to issue a policy the effect of which would be to say, 'I the DPP have decided not to apply part of the law which parliament has put in place and hasn't removed'."
But Lord Joffe said publishing such guidance would help the relatives or friends who travel with terminally ill people to Switzerland for an assisted suicide decide whether or not they were breaking the law.
He noted that there had already been 22 cases of Britons travelling to the clinic of the Swiss euthanasia charity Dignitas in Zurich to end their lives.
Yesterday it emerged that a man who comforted his terminally ill sister during her 26-hour suicide will not be charged with a crime. Graham Lawson, from west Kent, faced the possibility of 14 years' imprisonment because he watched his 48-year-old sister Sue die.
She repeatedly tried to suffocate herself with a plastic bag, "howling" with despair as she reached the point of being unable to resist taking a breath, said Mr Lawson.
Former bank manager Ms Lawson made seven unsuccessful attempts as her brother comforted her. She finally succeeded on the eighth attempt and Mr Lawson was questioned by police.
"I was arrested, stripped of my clothes, photographed and made to feel like some kind of murderer," said Mr Lawson, 35.
"I was arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting suicide but to this day I don't know what that is. As far as I knew, I was just being compassionate."
The select committee hearing also comes less than a week after Brian Blackburn 62, of Ash, Surrey, avoided jail for helping his cancer-stricken wife Margaret commit suicide in a final "act of love". The retired policeman received a nine months' sentence suspended for two years, with a supervision order.
