The 12-year-old’s parents fought a bitter legal battle to stop doctors, who believed Archie was brain dead, from withdrawing the treatment. After that failed, they launched a new legal challenge – also unsuccessful – to have him transferred to a hospice to die. In a statement released through the Christian Legal Center, which is supporting the family’s case, the family said: “We want something good to come out of this tragedy and the horrible experience we had with the system. “No parent or family should have to go through this again. We have been forced to fight a relentless legal battle by the hospital trust while facing an unimaginable tragedy. We were backed into a corner by the system, stripped of all our rights and had to fight for Archie’s true “best interests” and the right to live with everything stacked against us. “This has now happened all too often to parents who do not want their seriously ill children to be taken off life support. The pressure of the process was incredible. There needs to be an inquiry and investigation through the proper channels into what happened to Archie and we will demand change.” Archie had been in a coma since April 7 when he was found unconscious by his mother, Hollie Dance, at their home in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. A legal battle with Dance, 46, and Archie’s father Paul Battersbee, 57, with Barts Health NHS trust began in May before reaching its conclusion on Friday night when the European Court of Human Rights refused to review if he should be transferred to an asylum. Archie’s court-appointed guardian had agreed with the trust that it was in the 12-year-old’s best interests to be withdrawn from life-support treatment and that moving him to a hospice would be too dangerous. Similar harrowing cases involving children receiving life-support treatment, including Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans and Tafida Raqeeb, have prompted similar calls for law change to increase parental rights when such tragedies occur. Dance had previously called for reform through ‘Charlie’s Law’, which was proposed by Chris Gard and Connie Yates after they lost a legal battle to prevent their son’s treatment at Great Ormond Street Hospital being withdrawn. They wanted him flown to the US for treatment. Charlie died in July 2017, aged 11 months. The Department of Health and Social Care is currently commissioning a review into the causes of disagreement in the care of critically ill children, as required by the Health and Care Act 2022. Lady Finlay, a peer and professor of palliative medicine, said the inquiry would consider independent mediation to prevent “adversarial conflict” in court. The intervention of third-party groups, such as the anti-LGBT and anti-abortion Christian Legal Center, in such cases has come under fire. In Alfie’s case, a High Court judge said court cases by Pavel Stroilov, a law student at the center representing the toddler’s parents, were “full of vitriol and bile” that were “inconsistent with real interests of the parents’ case”.
