How the law turns desperate people into criminals

British courts regard euthanasia as murder and can impose a penalty of life imprisonment. Helping someone to commit suicide is also a criminal offence, punishable with a maximum 14-year jail sentence.

Such harsh deterrents leave law-abiding citizens committed to a dignified death little choice but to seek final relief in countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands, where some forms of euthanasia are legal.

In Britain, moves to soften the laws that criminalise euthanasia are controversial and face political resistance. But in recent years the law's application has been subtly eroded so that the courts are now reluctant to punish those who say they kill out of love.

It was the case of Diane Pretty, who suffered an advanced form of motor neurone disease, that first triggered a reassessment of the law of assisted dying.

Although Mrs Pretty eventually lost her case at the European Court of Human Rights in 2001 (the Strasbourg judges rejected the idea that there was an absolute right to die) her plight raised awareness of the perceived short-comings in the law.

Since then the High Court has considered a number of cases of terminally ill people who wish to travel abroad to die. In 2004 Mr Justice Hedley lifted a travel ban on a woman, known only as Mrs Z, who suffered from cerebellar ataxia, a degenerative brain disease, and wanted to end her life in an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland. The case had come to court only because her local council had alerted the police to her intentions and then taken out an injunction stopping her from travelling.

Mr Justice Hedley said that it was not for the civil courts to indirectly interfere with her rights to travel to another country to die. The case was hailed as breakthrough in assisted dying, which would pave the way for others to choose a dignified death abroad. But despite a number of attempts to introduce reform, the substantive law on euthanasia in this country remains in place. The most recent attempt, the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, championed by Nelson Mandela's lawyer Lord Joffe, was defeated in the House of Lords last year.

Lord Joffe's intention was to give a terminally ill adult, who faces unbearable suffering, the right to be able to ask for medical help to die. The Bill was defeated in May last year by a vote of 148 to 100, the closest ever parliamentary vote on the issue.

Yet the criminal courts consistently adopt a lenient and sympathetic approach when sentencing those convicted of mercy killing. In October last year a man who helped his terminally-ill wife to die was freed with a nine-month suspended sentence. The Old Bailey judge talked of his "selfless devotion" and said he had "little choice" but to respect his wife's decision.

A month later the Law Commission, the Government's independent law advisory body, recommended that mercy killings be reduced from first to second-degree murder. Under the proposal judges would be given much more flexibility when sentencing. The Home Office will shortly respond to the Law Commission's recommendations.