A top German court has ruled that it is not a criminal offence to cut off the life support of a dying person if that person has given their consent. The Federal Court of Justice acquitted a lawyer who had advised the daughter of a comatose woman to cut off her feeding tube.

Earlier the patient had expressed her wish not to be kept alive artificially.

The lawyer appealed to the federal court after a lower court had given him a nine-month suspended sentence.

The mother, in her seventies, fell into a coma in 2002 and had been in a vegetative state for five years when her daughter removed the feeding tube. After the daughter's action hospital staff reinserted a feeding tube, against the children's wishes, but the patient died of heart failure two weeks later.

Germany's Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said the Karlsruhe federal court ruling brought clarity to cases involving terminally ill patients.

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