Concerns from lawyers
Serious legal concerns remain about how the assisted dying law is operating in New Zealand. Over 200 lawyers — including Queen’s Counsel, human rights, and disability specialists — identified significant flaws in the legislation and warned it poses real risks to vulnerable people when the End of Life Choice Act was being considered. These concerns are heightened by the reality that intentionally ending another person’s life is now legal, creating profound challenges for the law.
Lack of accountability
From a legal perspective, concerns have consistently been raised by lawyers about the strength of accountability within the assisted dying framework. Lawyers have pointed out that oversight relies largely on retrospective reporting — often based on information provided by those directly involved — rather than independent, real-time scrutiny. In practice, this limits the ability to verify whether safeguards have been properly applied or whether undue influence or coercion has occurred.
At the same time, the reporting that is publicly available is largely aggregated and high-level. This means there is little transparency into individual cases, making it difficult to assess how decisions are being made or to identify patterns of concern. As a result, accountability can become more about confirming that processes were followed on paper, rather than examining whether deeper legal or ethical issues were present.
Taken together, these concerns suggest a system where meaningful oversight is limited, and where risks to vulnerable individuals may not be fully detected or addressed.
The legal threat of expansion
Once a law like this is established, its boundaries rarely remain fixed. The nature of the framework means that eligibility criteria and application are likely to be challenged, reinterpreted, and expanded over time. Lawyers warned of this before the legislation was passed, drawing on patterns seen in overseas jurisdictions where initial safeguards have been progressively widened through legal challenges and policy changes. That pressure is already emerging in New Zealand. Legal challenges and proposals to change how the law is applied are beginning to surface — the threat of expansion is no longer theoretical, it is here.
It is not only eligibility criteria under pressure. The right for institutions to conscientiously object to hosting euthanasia on their premises is also being challenged — just as lawyers predicted.