BERLIN — Germany’s top criminal court issued a ruling Friday legalizing assisted suicide in cases in which it is carried out based on a patient’s prior request.
The ruling came as the court overturned the conviction of a lawyer who had counseled his client in 2007 to stop tube-feeding her mother, who had been in a coma for five years. A lower court had convicted attorney Wolfgang Putz of attempted manslaughter and given him a nine-month suspended sentence.
The Federal Court of Justice said the 71-year-old woman had said in 2002, before falling into the coma, that she did not want to be kept alive under such circumstances.
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger welcomed the ruling as a major step toward respecting an individual’s wishes.
“There can’t be forced treatment against a person’s will,” she said in a statement. “This is about the right of self-determination and therefore a question of a life in human dignity until the end.”
Germany took political steps to clarify the legal situation surrounding assisted suicide late last year.
Parliament passed a law that made people’s declarations on whether they wanted treatment to prolong their lives after an accident or when terminally ill binding for doctors.
But the court ruling now makes it legal to end a person’s life by halting medical treatment, if it is his wish.
In the case considered, the 71-year-old woman fell into a coma after a cerebral hemorrhage in October 2002. Confined to a nursing home, she was fed through a tube for five years.
“An improvement of her health situation was not to be expected anymore,” the court said.
But the nursing home refused to let the woman die.
The woman’s daughter eventually cut the feeding tube on her lawyer’s advice, with her brother and the attorney present. The nursing home reinstalled a tube shortly thereafter, but the woman died two weeks later “of natural causes,” the court said.
A state court in Fulda acquitted the woman’s daughter, as she was acting on the advice of her lawyer, a specialist in medical law. The attorney, however, was convicted in April 2009 and then appealed to the high court.
The court did not release the names of the 71-year-old patient or her daughter.
Across Europe, authorities are struggling to find an answer to how to end a terminally ill patient’s life in dignity and in accordance with the law.
Switzerland has one of the most liberal laws that allows assisted suicide, even though they are coming under increasing public scrutiny as scores of foreigners every year travel toSwitzerland to die.
The Swiss government last year proposed restricting “suicide tourism,” and a law is due to be sent to parliament later this year.
The Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2002, requiring the agreement of several doctors that a patient is suffering greatly with no hope of recovery, and has asked to die. Similar regulation is in place in Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
But assisted suicide is illegal in Finland, Spain, France and in Italy, where the influence of the Vatican is strongly felt.
After a case in which a family ended the life of a girl who had been in a vegetative state for 17 years, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s government last year introduced legislation banning caregivers from takingsuch action.
Information for this article was contributed by Eliane Engeler, Toby Sterling, Colleen Barry and Christina Okello of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 06/26/2010