“Vincent is fine. Vincent is not at the end of his life”, said his mother Viviane after leaving the hospital on Tuesday once his nutrition and hydration had resumed. “Vincent needs only to drink, eat and be loved“. He is not “the vegetable connected to machines that people have always described him as”, confirmed Jérôme Triomphe, the parents’ lawyer: “a vegetable does not cry”.
“From now on, the fight is for Vincent to be transferred to a specialized unit, where he will be cared for with kindness by specialists“, Triomphe continued. He stated that he had already taken “a certain number of steps” in view of a transfer so that “Vincent comes out on top of this real hellhole that his hospital has become“.
The Holy See yesterday called for “effective solutions to be found as soon as possible to protect Mr Lambert’s life“, denouncing the “grave violation of the dignity of the person that the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration would constitute. Continuity of assistance is an inescapable duty“, it pointed out. Pope Francis is opposed to ‘therapeutic obstinacy’ that artificially prolongs life, but supports respecting the natural term of life against any form of euthanasia.
Following the latest decision of the Paris Court of Appeal and the resumption of Vincent Lambert’s care, the hearing scheduled for Thursday at the Council of State to order that the withdrawal of “care” be suspended pending examination of the complaint filed to the UN International Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was cancelled “because the parties had abandoned“.
“In the death-penalty era, lawyers tried to find all possible and imaginable appeals to overturn their client’s death sentence“, observed Frédéric Rolin, a professor of public law at the University of Paris-Sud. “When a man’s life is at stake, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to look for all possible appeals. I don’t think we can talk about judicial harassment” in the Lambert case, Rolin added.
For further reading:
AFP (21/05/2019, 22/05/2019)