22. Terminally Ill Woman Fights for Right to Die

The first legal challenge to Britain's law on assisted suicide was launched yesterday by a woman who is terminally ill with motor neurone disease.

Diane Pretty, 42, who has great difficulty moving and speaking, and has to be fed through a tube, is seeking leave to judicially review a decision by the director of public prosecutions not to rule out prosecuting her husband, Brian, if he helps her to commit suicide.

Lawyers for Mrs Pretty argued that her quality of life is so low that she has the right under human rights legislation to choose to die.

But anti-euthanasia campaigners warned that if her case is successful it would mean the lives of people with progressive illnesses were no longer protected by law and would leave them feeling vulnerable and unsafe.

Mrs Pretty and her husband wrote to Tony Blair and the director of public prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith, seeking assurances that Mr Pretty or a doctor of their choosing would not be charged under the Suicide Act 1961 if they aided her death. But their plea was rejected by Mr Calvert-Smith, who conceded that Mrs Pretty and her family were having to endure "terrible suffering" but said he could not offer such a guarantee.

It is a criminal offence punishable by 14 years' imprisonment to assist, aid or counsel somebody in relation to taking their own life.

Lawyers for Mrs Pretty, who has been refused legal aid, claim the law breaches her rights under Article 3 of the Human Rights Act to not be subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment, and Article 8, which upholds the right of personal autonomy.

Mrs Pretty, whose case is supported by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and the civil rights group Liberty, is one of around 5 000 people in Britain with motor neurone disease—the degeneration of the nerve cells along which the brain sends instructions to the muscles. There is no treatment and sufferers usually die within five years of diagnosis.

In a statement given to her lawyers Mrs Pretty said: "I want the court to know that I want the right to die at the time of my choosing, with dignity, now that I have lost all functions apart from my mind."

Mr Pretty, her husband of 25 years, said it was degrading to let her live. "Everybody, like yourself and myself, we can do everything for ourselves. We have the right to refuse whatever we wish to refuse. Diane has not," he told BBC Radio Five Live.

"She has got to turn round and have people pull her about ... everything has got to be done for her."

He added: "The way the law stands, somebody in a terminally ill position who has attempted to do all the medication and who has attempted to do all the therapies and after all that still cannot handle living with the illness, cannot be helped to die."

"She has not turned round and said she wants me to help her to die."

"What she has turned round and said is the illness has got so much to her that she wants to die."

"Not being able to physically do it herself, she would like to be assisted to die."

John Wadham, director of Liberty, said the Human Rights Act could help the couple. "There is a provision against torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and usually that's designed to protect individuals from actions by the police and other security forces."

"However in the act there is a positive duty and we are saying that positive duty applies to the director of public prosecutions."

Deborah Annets, director of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, accused the government of "inhumanity" in refusing the couple's request.

"The government has failed Mrs Pretty and condemned her to extreme physical and mental suffering. We ask that they now take steps urgently to meet their obligation and allow her the dignified death she is entitled to."

But Richard Lamerton, a spokesman for Alert, which campaigns against legalising euthanasia, said that while he sympathised with Mrs Pretty, if her case was successful there would be no guarantees that the decision would not affect people whose lives could be made more tolerable and fulfilling.

"I work in a hospital in South Wales and like all people who have worked in a hospital I have met so many people with incurable diseases who wanted euthanasia until the hospital got involved and then they did not want it anymore."

"Once you have killed somebody they have no rights and no choice. It would leave the door open to all sorts of dubious decisions and abuse and would mean that people with progressive illnesses no longer had the protection of the law and could be put under all sorts of pressure to agree to take their own lives."