Cape Town - Sean Davison, the University of the Western Cape professor who helped his mother to end her life, says he sees no reason police would want to investigate him after he revealed this week he had assisted a friend to die.
Davison made the revelation during a recent speech at the World Federation of Right to Die Societies in Chicago.
The UWC professor, who was sentenced in November 2011 to five months’ house arrest in New Zealand for helping his terminally ill mother die, said he would now focus on getting assisted dying legislation passed in South Africa.
Speaking to Weekend Argus a day after his return to South Africa, Davison said he had not been contacted by any South African law enforcement agency, and did not expect to be, after revealing he had helped his friend Dr Anrich Burger to die at a Cape Town hotel.
Burger, who became a quadriplegic at age 34 after a car crash in Botswana, died after he consumed a lethal dose of the drug phenobarbital in a Waterfront hotel room in the company of Davison.
“Dr Burger had clearly indicated he wanted to end his life,” said Davison. “He had obtained his own medication. It was only at the very end that I shared his final journey.”
In his speech, Davison said Burger was a “very good friend” who had “lost all control and autonomy over his life”.
“His last hours were the first time I had seen him in complete peace. He expressed the joy of being able to leave this world of pain and humiliation.”
Davison, the head of UWC’s forensic DNA laboratory, said the drafting of a South African assisted dying law would be discussed at a meeting of Dignity SA later this week.
Dignity SA is a group that campaigns for legalised assisted dying in South Africa.
The group will discuss drafting a law modelled on the Assisted Dying Bill currently before the UK parliament.
If passed, the UK bill would let terminally ill people “request and lawfully be provided with assistance to end his or her own life” by a doctor.
Under the the UK bill, a person is terminally ill if he or she has been diagnosed by a doctor as having an “inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment” and as a result of this has less than six months to live.
Dignity SA currently defines terminally ill as “a prognosis of less than 12 months”.
Davison said he thought it possible to get cross-party support for a South African assisted dying bill, but said his organisation hadn’t yet approached political parties to lobby for it.
He said the bill could be introduced to the National Assembly as a private member’s bill, but all options would be discussed later this week.
Weekend Argus