Landmark decision on assisted suicide in Germany

Germany's  highest court ruled Friday that it is not a criminal offense to cut off life-sustaining treatment for a patient. The court overturned the conviction of a lawyer who last year had been found guilty of attempted manslaughter for advising a client to sever the intravenous feeding tube that was keeping her mother alive although in a persistent vegetative state. The mother had told her daughter that she did not wish to be kept alive artificially.

In its decision, the court clearly distinguished between “killing with the aim of terminating life” and an action, “which let a patient die with his or her own consent.”

The ruling strengthens the individual’s right to die with dignity, since terminating life-sustaining treatments will no longer be a crime if patients have declared their wishes.

There has been a growing debate in Europe over assisted suicide, particularly in Britain. In February, a British filmmaker Ray Gosling after he admitted to helping kill a former lover. Euthanasia with the consent of the patient — sometimes called voluntary euthanasia — is legal in some European countries, including Belgium and Switzerland.

Germans have traveled to Switzerland to die for years. But it is an especially difficult topic in Germany because the Nazis used the term as cover for a mass extermination program of disabled people.

“The verdict transmits a fatal signal that does not comply with the the critically sick people’s fundamental right to self-determination and care,” said Eugen Brysch, the director of the German Hospice Foundation, in a statement Friday. Mr. Brysch took exception, in particular, with the fact that the woman, Erika Küllmer, expressed her wish orally rather than in writing.

Germany’s conservative chancellor Merkel declared in 2008 that she was “absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

Those comments were made in the wake of a scandal after a German campaigner for assisted suicide, Roger Kusch, helped Bettina Schardt, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, kill herself at home even though she was not sick nor dying; she simply had not wanted to move into a nursing home.