The 2012 report of the commission on assisted dying: Providing assistance in the debate that will not die?

The Commission on Assisted Dying was an unofficial body set up to investigate the legal position on assisted dying in the UK in the autumn of 2010. Its report was published to some degree of media attention in the first week of January 2012; its most headline-grabbing suggestion provided a framework setting out how British law might be reformed to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill. In this paper, I analyse some of the key points of the report and argue that it adds little that could settle - or even add to - the assisted dying debate.