Why couldn't Dr Turner die in Britain?

Helping someone to kill themselves - known as assisted suicide - is a crime in Britain which carries a sentence of up to 14 years imprisonment.

Assisted suicide differs from euthanasia in that the "helper" does not directly administer the fatal dose of drugs to the patient, but gives them means to do it themselves.

Other European countries have more liberal laws, including the Netherlands and Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal providing it is not carried out for gain.

Demand for help in dying

Research published last week estimated that nearly 3,000 patients were illegally helped to die by doctors on British soil in 2004.

The independent academic report also revealed that an estimated one third of people who died in the year - 192,000 patients - had their deaths accelerated by doctors using pain relief, the so-called "double effect".

Suicide tourism

Following Dr Anne Turner’s assisted suicide there today, the Zurich-based Dignitas clinic has now helped 42 Britons end their lives.

The first high-profile Dignitas case was that of Reg Crew, a 74-year-old sufferer of motor neurone disease, whose final hours were filmed for a TV documentary. The former soldier, of Hunt’s Cross, Liverpool, died there in January 2003 after drinking water laced with a lethal dose of barbiturates.

He was the second Briton to travel to Zurich for Dignitas’s services, and the first to do so publicly.

In April of that year, Robert Stokes, 60, and wife Jennifer, 53, from Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, who were both terminally ill, carried out a suicide pact on the same day, with the help of Dignitas doctors.

Dignitas now has 673 British members, compared with fewer than 100 at the time of Mr Crew’s suicide. Opponents of euthanasia say Dignitas and another Swiss organisation offering similar services, Exit, have contributed to the growing scale of "suicide tourism".

In a significant development last month, a university hospital in Switzerland announced that it would become the first in Europe to allow assisted suicide on its premises.

The University of Lausanne said it would allow patients to kill themselves at its 800-bed teaching hospital, provided they were terminally ill and of sound mind.

Pressure for a change to the law in Britain

One of the highest-profile campaigners for a change in the UK was Diane Pretty, who fought a lengthy and determined legal challenge to avoid what she feared would be a prolonged, traumatic and painful death.

The mother of two was paralysed from the neck down by motor neurone disease. SHe had been offered the chance to die at Dignitas’s facilities but rejected the offer. She died aged 43 in a hospice near her home in Luton in May 2002.

In January last year, Brian Blackburn, from Ash, Surrey, escaped a prison sentence for helping his cancer-stricken wife Margaret commit suicide in the UK. Judge Richard Hawkins at the Old Bailey ruled that Mr Blackburn’s actions were a final "act of love".

As Mr Blackburn’s case was being heard, a peer was attempting to change UK law on euthanasia by introducing the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill to Parliament.

Lord Joffe’s legislation would have legalised assisted suicide, and could have led to 15,000 cases a year in Britain, but without Government backing it stood virtually no chance of becoming law.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth