BRITAIN: The European Court of Human Rights has rejected a terminally ill woman's appeal to allow her husband to help her to die. Ms Diane Pretty appealed to the Strasbourg court after Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) refused to guarantee immunity from prosecution to her husband Brian if he assisted her suicide.
A panel of seven judges expressed sympathy for Ms Pretty, who suffers from motor-neurone disease, but ruled that the British authorities were not infringing her human rights by preventing her assisted suicide.
"To seek to build into the law an exemption for those judged to be incapable of committing suicide would seriously undermine the protection of life which the 1961 Suicide Act was intended to safeguard and would greatly increase the risk of abuse," the judges said.
Ms Pretty, who is paralysed from the neck down, condemned the judgment, which ends her legal battle with the British authorities. Speaking in London with the help of an electronic vocal device, she declared that the legal system had failed her.
"The law has taken away all my rights," she said.
Her husband said that he had mixed feelings about the ruling.
"I'm pleased in one respect because it means I have my wife here for a bit longer, but I'm very sad because her choice of when to die has been taken away from her," he said.
Ms Pretty uses a wheelchair and is fed through a tube and her lawyers have described her life expectancy as "very poor". She argued that the British courts' refusal to free her husband from the fear of legal action infringed the couple's rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Suicide is allowed in Britain but assisting a suicide is against the law and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
The court ruled yesterday that the European Convention on Human Rights safeguarded the right to life but not the right to die.
Although the Convention also protected against inhuman or degrading treatment, the court found that it was not the British government which had inflicted such treatment upon her.
"Article 2 is first and foremost a prohibition on the use of lethal force or other conduct which might lead to the death of a human being, and did not confer any claim on an individual to require a State to permit or facilitate his or her death," the court said.
The judges described the prohibition on assisted suicide as a measure intended to protect the weak and vulnerable.
The fact that Britain's Suicide Act did not distinguish between those who were and who were not physically capable of committing suicide could not be seen as breaching Human Rights Convention rules on discrimination.
"Cogent reasons exist for not seeking to distinguish between those able and unable to commit suicide unaided," the judgment said.
The Netherlands became the first country in Europe to legalise euthanasia fully on April 1st.
Similar legislation is expected to come into force soon in Belgium, and other countries, including Switzerland, France and Sweden, tolerate assisted suicides.
Meanwhile, a British woman paralysed from the neck down, and who won the right to die in a landmark case last month, has died peacefully in her sleep, the British Department of Health said yesterday.
The 43-year-old had been the first person in Britain in full control of their mental faculties to have asked doctors to switch off their life support system.
"Miss B has chosen to have all artificial ventilation which she is receiving as part of her medical treatment withdrawn," a Department of Health spokeswoman said.
"She has died peacefully in her sleep after being taken off the ventilator at her request."
"Miss B" could not be named for legal reasons.
A ruptured blood vessel in the woman's neck a year ago left her paralysed and unable to breathe unaided