If you live in the UK and help someone to go to Switzerland for an Assisted Voluntary Death then you will, almost certainly, have committed the offence of “assisting a suicide”. Simply joining them on the trip would probably be sufficient. However, crucially, you would not be prosecuted for the offence if you were clearly “motivated by compassion”. Therefore you must not have had any financial motive or been persuasive in favour of the visit itself. This is the guidance as issued by the Director of Public Prosecutions. That guidance also requires that anyone returning from such a visit must report what they have done to their local police station.
You would have thought that the British police would know what to do with such a report. There must be around forty per year. But they don’t. The reactions vary enormously from one local police force to another.
In Surrey, for example, one such report was regarded as “wasting police time”. By contrast, in a recent North Yorkshire case woman accompanied her husband (who had MND) to Dignitas in December 2024 She reported what she had done but then had to wait until October 2025 to hear that she was not going to be prosecuted. Throughout that time the police kept her husband’s laptop.
In a Dorset case, admittedly more complex, Sean Davison was arrested in July 2024 but still has not heard whether he is going to be charged or not. As with the North Yorkshire case, his PC, laptop and mobile phone have not been returned.
The damage caused by such delays must be awful. If your husband has died but you are suddenly denied access to his records then, whether as an executor or as a widow, your worries and uncertainty will have doubled. Further, you will be living in fear that you yourself might actually be charged with a serious criminal offence.
I failed to get any response at all when I raised this issue with my own local police force. A former member of the police committee threw some light on the matter with “You need to understand, John, that these people have broken the law. They are criminals. They can’t be punished through the normal course of justice and therefore the delay IS the punishment”.
Hopefully some bright law student somewhere will take on board the complex issues raised but such a startlingly simple response.
