This archive report was first published on 1 July 2019.
On July 1, 2019, Viviane Lambert, the mother of Vincent Lambert, made a desperate appeal to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, saying, "They want to murder Vincent."
Her son, Vincent Lambert, has been in a vegetative state since a 2008 traffic accident. The question of whether to continue keeping him alive artificially has bitterly divided his family and the nation.
The case has taken the warring Lambert family to the top courts in France and Europe, with Lambert's parents fighting a six-year legal battle to maintain his treatment.
However, in May 2019, a UN committee on disabled rights asked France to keep Lambert alive while it conducted its own investigation into his fate. The French government rejected this request as non-binding.
On June 17, 2019, the Cour de Cassation, France's highest appeals court, ruled that the life support mechanisms keeping Lambert alive could be turned off "from now on." This decision reversed a previous court ruling that had ordered Lambert's feeding tubes to be reinserted.
Condemning the French government's position, Jean Paillot, one of the parents' lawyers, said, "This is absolutely scandalous and clearly justifies our presence here today." Jerome Triomphe, another lawyer for the parents, denounced "France's serious violations of its international obligations to the detriment of a handicapped man."
