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UPDATE, Jan. 21, 2021, 6:05 p.m.: Poland’s state news service is reporting that it is a “matter of hours” before RS is issued a diplomatic passport by the Polish government. According to TVP.pl, Poland’s deputy Minister of Justice, Marcin Wachoł, stated that the passport is “being prepared.” Wachoł explained that this passport will remove RS from the juridiction of the British courts.” Meanwhile, he confirmed that a helicopter is waiting to return RS to Poland.
It is not yet clear whether diplomatic status, in the eyes of the British courts, will take precedence over what the courts have repeatedly called RS’s “best interests.” As RS has a serious disorder of consciousness, the British courts have, since December 15, adamantly insisted that RS’s “best interests” are to be removed from clinically assisted nutrition and hydration and given palliative care until he is dead. LifeSiteNews heard this evening that RS was expected to be dead by Monday. However, he has survived. “We don’t know how much longer my brother can hang on,” wrote one of his sisters this morning in a tweet aimed at several Polish authorities, including President Duda and Prime Minister Morawiecki.
WARSAW, Poland, January 20, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In a desperate attempt to save a Polish national from death by dehydration and starvation in a British hospital, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Rau, has proposed granting him diplomatic status.
“In regards to the matter of the Polish citizen staying in a hospital in Plymouth, Great Britain, I inform you that I am taking all possible steps to have him granted diplomatic status,” he tweeted earlier today.
The announcement, not surprisingly, was greeted with a chorus of “Hurry up!” The patient in question, known to the English-speaking world only as “P” or “RS,” has been deprived of hydration and nutrition since Thursday.
Also today, bishops writing on behalf of Cardinal Nichols, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, have asked the U.K.’s Minister of Health Matt Hancock to facilitate moving RS to Poland, where he will be cared for.
The RS case has thrown in sharp relief the legal and cultural differences between RS’s adopted country of Great Britain and his predominantly Catholic homeland of Poland. In a recent letter to England’s Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Poland’s most senior churchman, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, stated that RS, a devout, pro-life Catholic, “was, de facto, sentenced to death of starvation.”
However, the English Court of Protection judge who decided that RS’s life could lawfully end this way believes that this was in RS’s “best interests.”
Justice Cohen has also expressed grave concern over the publication of videos of “RS” showing him disabled in his hospital bed, and for the repeated cessation and continuation of RS’s treatment, suggesting that there could be no greater insult to the patient’s dignity.
However, Polish individuals and Polish media organizations have been publishing the videos to bring public attention to RS’s impending death by dehydration and starvation, one unthinkable in majority-Catholic Poland.
In this case the resistance of the British is aimed not only at this particular patient (RS) but also in our Polish conservative and traditional values. Are we still human beings?@UN @BorisJohnson @PolishEmbassyUK @DCummingsMcLean @prezydentpl @PremierRP_en @MZ_GOV_PL @MS_GOV_PL https://t.co/wLe8hZNEph
— AssisTech Sp. z o.o. (@AssisTechPL) January 10, 2021
PETITION UPDATE (1/26/21) -
With regret, we report that Mr. R.S. has passed away (+RIP). May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Thank you for keeping him and his loved ones in your prayers.
Please read this LifeSite article on R.S.'s passing: 'BREAKING: Pro-life Polish Catholic dies from dehydration, starvation in English hospital' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-pro-life-polish-catholic-dies-from-dehydration-starvation-in-english-hospital
We hereby suspend this petition.
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PETITION UPDATE (1/22/21) -
The Polish government has issued a diplomatic passport to a Polish patient dying from the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration in an English hospital.
According to multiple Polish media sources, including the mainstream national newspaper Rzeczpospolita, the Polish government has issued the passport in an attempt to remove the Polish patient from the power of the British courts. Conservative news website wPolityce has reported that the passport is already on its way to London.
The case has become a major scandal in Poland, public anger snowballing since the news spread to the Eastern European country in late December. Jacek Kotula, a Polish regional councillor and leading pro-life activist, told LifeSiteNews that “all Poland” is talking about it.
“Thank you for the support,” he said, referring to LifeSiteNews’ ongoing coverage of the case, “because it is a battle with the Civilization of Death.”
“For us Poles, euthanasia is Hitlerism [Nazism] … How can a normal person say that is in the best interests of a dying Pole that he should die? In Poland we fight until the end for life, which is the greatest gift of the Creator!”
Please continue to SIGN and SHARE this urgent petition. And, please continue to pray for a miracle. Thank you!
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PETITION UPDATE (1/19/21) -
Another legal intervention on behalf of R.S. to save his life by having nutrition and hydration restored to him has been refused by the presiding judge in the U.K.
Judge Cohen refused to allow the Polish Consul General to visit R.S., a Polish national who suffered a brain injury while residing in Britain.
This is the latest set-back for R.S.'s birth family, who have been trying every legal avenue to have R.S.'s nourishment reinstated, so that he could be transported from the U.K. to his native Poland, where he could be cared for.
Please pray that this situation would somehow be resolved, and life-enabling treatment restored.
'BREAKING: UK court forbids Polish Consul General from visiting Pole dying in English hospital' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-uk-court-forbids-polish-consul-general-from-visiting-pole-dying-in-english-hospital
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A Polish Catholic man who suffered a brain injury, R.S. (his identity has been protected), is being deliberately starved and dehydrated to death in a British hospital, even though he has shown signs of improvement.
Please SIGN and SHARE this urgent petition to help save this man's life by demanding that the British government and the treating hospital re-authorize nutrition and hydration with immediate effect.
This shocking situation has been going on since December, as R.S.'s wife and doctors have argued that R.S.'s vital life-support should be cut-off while his birth family has argued that his life-support should be maintained so that he can be transported back to Poland where he would be cared for.
R.S.'s mother stated: "I am devastated that the British authorities have decided to dehydrate my son to death. I want to take my son back to his own country, where I would be allowed to care for him," she said. "What the British authorities are trying to do to my son is euthanasia by a back door."
And, at Christmas, video of R.S. was taken showing his condition to have improved since he sustained his brain injury.
In the same video, R.S. is seen in what some have described as a 'minimally-conscious state,' but that evidence, and the accompanying testimony of two neurologists, was rejected out-of-hand by a British judge.
The birth family of R.S. then took the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which also summarily rejected the case for a technicality based on standing. The presiding judge, Judge Grozev, said that R.S.'s niece was not a close enough relation to him for the case to be heard.
How appalling a reason to deprive a man of food and water!
But, right now, R.S.'s lawyers from the Christian Legal Centre (CLC) are now pursuing a last-ditch effort to have the ECHR judge recused from the case because, as Dr. Roger Kiska of the CLC told LifeSite, "Mr. Grozev was a long-time member of the George Soros funded Open Society Foundation which advocates for the type of euthanasia being utilised in the R.S. case," before he became an ECHR judge.
All the while, the Polish Government has been doing everything in its power, including offering to airlift R.S. back to Poland, to help the situation.
So, in other words, there are people ready and willing to help take care of R.S. if and when released by the hospital for transit out of Britain.
Please SIGN this urgent petition to the British Government demanding that they stop the process of euthanizing R.S., and allow him to return to his home country where he may be able to recover from his current state.
After signing, please take a few minutes to politely contact the following:
British Embassy in Washington, D.C.
+1 (202) 588-6500
3100 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington DC 20008
USA
British High Commission
+1 (613) 237-1530
80 Elgin Street Ottawa Ontario K1P 5K7
Canada
Dominic Raab, Foreign Secretary
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
020 7219 7069
[email protected]
LATEST INFORMATION:
BREAKING: UK court forbids Polish Consul General from visiting Pole dying in English hospital - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-uk-court-forbids-polish-consul-general-from-visiting-pole-dying-in-english-hospital
'Hope dims for pro-life Polish Catholic now dying of hunger, thirst in English hospital' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/hope-dims-for-pro-life-polish-catholic-now-dying-of-hunger-thirst-in-english-hospital
'UK Courts Accused of 'Euthanasia by a Back Door' After Ordering Withdrawal of Vital Treatment for Foreign Citizen' - https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2021/january/uk-courts-accused-of-euthanasia-by-a-back-door-after-ordering-withdrawal-of-vital-treatment-for-foreign-citizen
**Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
Cohen made his remarks as Polish consular authorities were on their way to, or already arrived at, the English hospital in which RS was, and is, dying, to facilitate a remote medical examination by a Polish doctor. The NHS had made an emergency application to the Court to prevent this examination from happening.
In opposing the application, barrister James Bogle argued that the patient had a right to the visit by Polish consular authorities. Notably, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which Bogle cited, conceived of such a visit in a prison, not a hospital.
Although the patient sustained severe brain-damage after suffering a heart attack in early November, his doctors believe that he could live for another five years or more as long as he received clinically assisted water and hydration. However, in mid-December a court decided that it was not in RS’s best interests to continue living. Justice Cohen gave permission to the National Health Service (NHS) Trust and RS’s wife to “decide between themselves whether hydration is to be withdrawn.”
RS’s birth family, including his mother, two sisters and niece, have all opposed the cessation of RS’s life-sustaining treatment, firstly on the grounds that as a devout Catholic who opposed abortion, euthanasia and the court’s decision to end the life of Alfie Evans, RS would not want to die that way. They next argued that video footage they took of RS showed that he was recovering to some extent from his brain injury and was not in a vegetative, but in a minimally conscious state.
RS’s wife, however, has sided with the NHS in its opinion that RS’s life should come to an end. Although the Polish public has been appealing to political and religious leaders both British and Polish to save RS, there may be only one person who now has the power of life and death over the sick man: his wife.
To read LifeSiteNews’ detailed and up-to-date coverage of the RS case, please click on this link.
Readers may also donate and help the legal battle to keep RS alive at LifeSiteNews’ LifeFunder.