International Catholic Entity Initiates Campaign against Euthanasia in South Africa

The petitioners also want the National Assembly to enact legislation to give effect to their rights to self-determination.

The issue of assisted suicide had also been presented in a South African court in 2015 when lawyer Robert Stransham-Ford, who was dying, urgently petitioned the Pretoria High Court for an order to have a doctor give him a lethal dose to end his life.

While Judge Hans Fabricius ruled in Stransham-Ford’s favor, the petitioner died naturally two hours before the judgement was delivered.

On Tuesday, August 17, South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeals (SCA) overturned a ruling by a lower court granting a terminally ill patient the right to die, the Justice Ministry said, thereby upholding South Africa’s laws forbidding assisted suicide.

In 2016, South Africa’s SCA ruled in favor of the State, which had appealed the verdict, and overturned the ruling that had granted a terminally ill patient the right to assisted death.

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SCA judges ruled that the precedent, which had been set in Stransham-Ford’s case, “ceased to exist once the applicant died before the order could be granted.”

The SCA further decided that Stransham-Ford’s matter was “an inappropriate case in which to develop the common law of murder and culpable homicide.”

In their online statement, CitizenGo Africa officials say that legitimizing euthanasia in South Africa would “open a pandora's box and expose the aged, the vulnerable and the terminally ill people to deaths that they would not ask for as the doctors will be at liberty to terminate their lives.”

“Assisted Suicide will not only open a pandora's box on murder and death on demand but also will place South Africa as a country that disregards human dignity,” CitizenGo Africa officials add.

They continue, “A human being naturally has a right to life from conception till natural death but it seems now South African activists want to place the lives of the aged, the sick and even the vulnerable in the hands of doctors who already have been killing innocent pre-born babies through abortion.”

South Africa has previously legalized abortion, homosexuality, and comprehensive sexuality education.

CitizenGo is the international arm of Hazte Oir, the ultra-conservative Spanish Catholic organization that was founded in 2013 in Madrid, Spain as an advocacy foundation. It promotes online petitions in some 50 countries across the globe, defending Christian values including opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, and euthanasia.

Magdalene Kahiu is a Kenyan journalist with passion in Church communication. She holds a Degree in Social Communications from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA). Currently, she works as a journalist for ACI Africa.