To be or not to be, that may be the question, but you better not put it to Vincent Lambert; he won’t be able to answer you in any case as he lies in a hospital bed in a vegetative state for the past nearly six years.

Lambert had a motorcycle accident in September 2008 in the northeastern French city of Reims.

Though his body recovered, his brain did not and he never regained consciousness. In April last year, doctors decided to end his suffering by turning off the medical life support connections. In this they were backed by Rachel who said it was also her husband’s wish, though she could not explain how he was able to communicate it to her.

Lambert’s parents did not agree with Rachel and filed a petition in court to stop the doctors from ‘killing their son’, as they put it. Following many months of deliberation the judges agreed and declared that the medical care of a patient is ‘neither pointless nor disproportionate, its objective being the saving of a life and not prolonging it endlessly’.

In February this year Rachel was able to get the backing of François, the nephew of her husband. They jointly appealed to the country’s highest court, the State Council, which decided in its turn that in certain cases the doctors have the right to cut off the artificial hydration and food supply system that keeps a patient alive.

This time Lambert’s father and mother appealed to the European Court of Human Rights based in Strasbourg which on June 24 suspended the French supreme judicial body’s verdict at the same time igniting a fierce controversy all over the country on the question of euthanasia in extreme cases when there remains no hope of a patient’s recovery.

Lambert’s deeply religious Catholic parents said they were ‘infinitely relieved’ at the decision. According to their lawyer, “Vincent’s mother was in tears at the death sentence handed down to him by the State Council. Thanks to the Human Rights Court, those tears are today wiped dry.”

On the other hand, doctors at the Reims hospital believe the ruling will only ‘prolong Vincent’s plight by forcing them to continue providing the patient with a treatment he certainly doesn’t want’.

France today is split in two halves over the issue which comes at the same time as the trial of Dr Nicolas Bonnemaison who was accused of hastening the deaths of no fewer than seven patients connected on similar life-support systems. The main charge against Bonnemaison, an emergency room physician in the Bayonne hospital, was “poisoning particularly vulnerable people”. Five women and two men had died between March 2010 and July 2011 soon after being admitted to the hospital and then left in Bonnemaison’s care.

Dr Bonnemaison faced life imprisonment when his trial began in the middle of last month in the southern French city of Pau. During the hearings there were emotional and often poignant speeches appealing to the audience’s sense of compassion and comprehension. Some also laid emphasis on the solitary role of the doctors while taking major decisions and on the dangers of their profession. There were vivid descriptions too of the patients’ agony.

“There are no heroes here nor are there any martyrs; but no one will go home today unscathed after what has been said,” declared the chief prosecutor at the end of the trial. The defence lawyer on his part said it was time now for politicians to go ahead and modify the legislature that interdicts the practice of euthanasia in France though it is perfectly legal in many other European countries like Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Jean Leonetti, a French politician who is in favour of euthanasia, says: “If the Human Rights Court continues issuing rulings on individual cases like Lambert’s, it will have a lot of work to do on similar problems in the rest of the European countries too.”

As France today remains in the middle of a heated debate, there are frequent demonstrations, for or against euthanasia, in all the major cities. Not untypically, the dispute is also assuming somewhat philosophical proportions in the media. An editorial in the daily Le Figaro raises interesting questions in this regard:

“What is life and what is its worth? Is it simply the capacity to eat, to talk and to feel? At what stage does it become useless to go on living? Human history has reached a point where people no longer look for answers to these essential queries in reflection, in great philosophers’ writings or in sacred texts but in legal codes and court decisions. There certainly is something bone-chilling in all this!”

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2014