Empowering End-of-Life Choices

DeathRights' mission is to advocate for the rights of individuals facing death, dying and bereavement where this intersects with state power. We will support dying people and their families by providing them with information about their rights, and thus ensuring their voices are heard and respected in times of acute vulnerability and need. 

Our initial priorities are investigating the needs of people dying in prison or prisoners with a dying family member, as well as families who are dealing with a sudden death that is under criminal investigation by the police.  

People in these situations are often denied the support and death rites available to the rest of us, whether from family contact, palliative care, religious practice, or bereavement counselling. Worse still, the way deaths are handled by prisons and police can make the experience even more traumatic than any death needs to be.

When you are sent to prison, the punishment is supposed to be loss of liberty, not an inhumane death, or deprivation of end-of-life rituals. Nor should that person’s family and community be subjected to a more brutal bereavement.

We will be developing tools for using existing rights to challenge disparities of treatment and poor practice in this context, starting with the impact on racialised communities.

Our current geographic scope is England and Wales.

DeathRights is a new project under development by Emily Bolton and Shauneen Lambe.

Emily and Shauneen previously worked together in the Deep Southern United States on death penalty cases, the ultimate expression of state power over human life and death. We have worked with prisoners in the criminal legal system for a combined total of over 50 years.  We are now both training in end-of-life practice, Emily with Living Well Dying Well in the UK and Shauneen with Going with Grace in the US. 

Emily is a solicitor in England and Wales, and formerly an American attorney-at-law. She was the founder of the law practice and charity APPEAL (2014-2024). Emily was previously awarded an Equal Justice Fellowship and later a Soros Advocacy Fellowship to establish Innocence Project New Orleans. Emily also received a Shackleton Leadership Award to work on establishing APPEAL. 

Shauneen is a barrister in England and Wales and formerly an American attorney-at-law. She is former joint chief executive officer and co-founder of Just for Kids Law (2005-2018) and co-founder of Impact - Law for Social Justice, a consultancy that supports those considering using the law for social change. She is also Director of the Youth Justice Legal Centre. For her work, Shauneen has been awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship, and Ashoka Fellowship, a Shackleton Fellowship, and was a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.