A terminally-ill woman vowed yesterday to carry on her battle for the right to commit suicide, after British courts ruled against her in a legal saga that has deepened the emotional debate on euthanasia.
Ms Diane Pretty said she would take her legal challenge to the European Court of Human Rights after the House of Lords, the highest court in Britain, ruled that her husband would be guilty of a crime if he helped her die.
"I want to go on. I feel I have no rights," Ms Pretty said afterwards via her husband and supporters. Suffering from motor neurone disease, paralysed from the neck down, unable to speak and fed through a tube, she may have only months to live.
Anti-euthanasia campaigners however greeted Thursday's ruling with scarcely disguised relief. Ms Alison Davis, a campaigner who suffers from spina bifida, osteoporosis and emphysema, said: "I was really terrified that if she had won, my safety would be compromised.
"Fortunately I am surrounded by people who helped me see that you can still be dignified even if you are disabled."
The five judges, some of the most senior in Britain, said they sympathised with Ms Pretty's plea to be allowed "to die with dignity", but said the law could not be changed without parliamentary consent.
"No one of ordinary sensitivity could be unmoved by the frightening ordeal which faces Mrs Diane Pretty," Judge Thomas Bingham said. With no hope of recovery, and only a short time to live she "faces the prospect of a humiliating and distressing death," he said. But, endorsing the rulings of lower courts, the judges said European human rights legislation did not enshrine the right to euthanasia. Under English law, assisting in a suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in jail, although taking one's own life ceased to be a crime in 1961.
After the court ruling Ms Pretty's husband, Brian, who supports his wife's actions and is willing to assist in her death, said they would take their case to the European Court of Human Rights.