Opposed to stop treatment for their son, patient in a vegetative state for ten years, Vincent Lambert parents will again appeal at the courts.
The parents of Vincent Lambert , tetraplegic patient in a vegetative state for more than ten years, will file “new appeals”Monday 20th May, 2019, day of the scheduled start of the end of treatments to which they oppose, announced their lawyers Sunday without further details.
Read also: Vincent Lambert’s parents implore Emmanuel Macron to maintain treatments
“The parents of Vincent Lambert also seize the competent authorities and courts of a disciplinary complaint for the purpose of removing Dr. Sanchez and criminal proceedings against him”, add in a statement Jean Paillot and Jérôme Triomphe, about the doctor the palliative care department and the “brain-damaged” unit of the Sevastopol hospital in Reims, where he is hospitalised.
The UN seized
After validation by the State Council at the end of April of the medical decision to stop feeding and hydration, Dr. Vincent Sanchez announced to the family the cessation of care the week of May 20 .
The parents’ lawyers have since seized a UN body, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which has asked France not to suspend care pending the examination of the case on the merits. by his care. But France repeats that these provisional measures “are not binding” and puts forward the “right of the patient not to suffer unreasonable obstinacy”.
On Saturday, the parents’ lawyers also implored Emmanuel Macron to keep the treatment in an open letter, calling the patient’s scheduled death a “state crime committed at the cost of a coup against the rule of law.”
Symbol of the end of life debate
With these “new appeals from Monday”, they intend to “respect the provisional measures requested twice by the UN and which the defender of rights has recalled the mandatory nature.”
A message that the patient’s parents will resume Sunday afternoon in front of the Sevastopol hospital where they called for a rally to “beg” the doctors “to continue feeding and hydrating” their sons.
A former psychiatric nurse, Vincent Lambert has been in a vegetative state for more than ten years following a road accident that occurred in September 2008, when he was 32 years old.
The case, which has become the symbol of the end-of-life debate in France, has been tearing apart its family for six years: on the one hand, parents, a brother and a sister oppose the end of care; on the other, his wife Rachel, his nephew François and five siblings of the patient denounce a “therapeutic relentlessness”.
