The care lavished on Vincent Lambert, a quadriplegic patient in a vegetative state for more than ten years, must be stopped from Monday.
The lawyers for Vincent Lambert’s parents , a tetraplegic patient in a vegetative state for more than ten years, implore Emmanuel Macron. They ask him to make “respect the provisional measures requested” by a committee of the UN by maintaining the treatments, in an open letter Saturday, May 18, 2019, to two days of the scheduled stop of the care.
Read also: Case Vincent Lambert: the doctor announces the cessation of treatments the week of May 20
Mr. President, Vincent Lambert will die without hydration in the week of May 20 if you do nothing and you are the last and the only one to intervene,” write Jean Paillot and Jerome Triomphe, parents’ lawyers and brother and sister opposed to stopping treatment.
“We come to ask you to enforce by the Minister of Health the obligations of France for the benefit of a disabled man.”
What position of France
The International Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) reporting to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Friday urged France to “take the necessary measures to ensure that food and hydration Vincent Lambert “are not suspended during the processing of his file by the Committee”.
This request should not change the position of France which puts forward the “right of the patient not to undergo unreasonable obstinacy”. On May 5, the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn also explained that France was not “legally” by this committee.
The CRPD had already made the same request on May 3rd. He specified then that France had a period of 6 months to provide him observations before a hearing on the merits.
“State crime”
“If France maintains its refusal to respect the interim measures requested twice by the CRPD (…) it is certain that France will be severely condemned after the examination of our appeal and will be designated to the international community as having violated the right of individual petition and the human rights that forced him “, predicts Mes Paillot and Triomphe.
“Mr President, just as France takes over the presidency of the Council of Europe for the next six months, what disastrous signal is our country launching, both for people with disabilities and for the international community? ? They add. “What is this urgency for Vincent Lambert to die? “.
According to them, his death “will appear to posterity as a state crime committed at the cost of a coup against the rule of law.”
On May 10, Vincent Lambert’s treating physician announced to the family the interruption of treatment, starting Monday.
