http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1741000/1741659.stm
Thursday, 3 January, 2002, 23:48
GMT
In the Netherlands a group of doctors
have announced that they have set up a fund to pay the legal costs of one
of their colleagues who is appealing against a murder conviction for assisting
the death of a patient who had not requested euthanasia.
The case widens the debate on mercy
killings in the Netherlands, which became the first country in the world
to legalize euthanasia on the 1 January.
A Dutch court found Dr Wilfred van
Ooijen guilty of murder last year but did not sentence him.
The doctor helped an 84-year-old
woman to die in a Christian nursing home in 1997.
Legal criteria
The patient was terminally ill and
in a coma, but had not requested euthanasia - one of the conditions required
for a doctor to end a patient's life.
Dr van Ooijen also failed to meet
another requirement when he did not seek a second medical opinion.
The doctor's supporters claim the
case is not about euthanasia but medical ethics, and that doctors encounter
similar situations regularly.
An estimated 5,000 people die from
euthanasia in the Netherlands each year, but only half of these cases are
reported.
Ongoing fears
Under the new law doctors can no
longer be prosecuted if they perform euthanasia with due care. The authorities
hope this will encourage more openness.
But some doctors like Dr van Ooijen
do not always adhere to the strict medical guidelines, when they take the
decision to help a patient with a humane death.
And some experts feel the cases of
many mercy killings will continue to go unreported, while doctors fear
that they, like Dr van Ooijen, could end up being labelled a murderer.
By Geraldine Coughlan at The Hague