Vincent Lambert ordered to die by France’s highest appeal court.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director – Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Sign the petition: Protect Vincent Lambert’s Life.

Vincent Lambert

On Friday, June 28, France’s highest appeal court ordered that treatment and care, including food and fluid, be withdrawn from Vincent Lambert, a man who was cognitively disabled in a motorcycle accident injury in 2008.

On May 20, Euro news reported that doctors, at a hospital in Reims France, were sedating Lambert as part of the process to withdraw fluids and food to cause him to die by dehydration, as approved by a court order.

Later, that day, Euro news reported that the Court of Appeal in Paris ordered that Lambert be fed and hydrated. The decision was in response to the UN Disability Rights Commission appeal. BBC news reported Lambert’s mother as saying:

“They are going to restore nutrition and give him drink. For once I am proud of the courts,” she said.

According to France 24, on Friday the Cour de Cassation reversed the decision of the Paris Court of Appeal. The article stated:

The ruling reverses a decision by another Paris court which last month ordered that Lambert’s feeding tubes be reinserted, just hours after doctors began switching off life support.

The Cour de Cassation did not consider the arguments for or against keeping Lambert alive, but only the question of whether the lower court was competent to rule on the case. 

In Friday’s decision, it found that the appeal court was not competent in a ruling that is final.

In early May, 2019, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of People with Disabilities intervened in the Lambert case stating that causing Lambert’s death by dehydration contravened his rights as a person with disabilities. Section 25f of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires nations to:

25(f) Prevent discriminatory denial of health care or health services or food and fluids on the basis of disability.