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The Final Episode

She died, aged 43, at a hospice, with her devoted husband at her side. The degenerative condition had left Diane paralysed and unable to take her own life.

Because she feared the suffocation that the disease would inevitably bring, she fought through the courts for her husband, Brian, to be given immunity from prosecution if he helped her to die, but, in the end, on 29 April, the European Court of Human Rights rejected her case. On 3 May, she was taken to a hospice. There she suffered the nightmare sitaution she had been terrified of as she slowly died.

Mr Pretty said, "Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of - and there was nothing I could do to help."

Deborah Annetts, director of The Voluntary Euthanasia Society, said, "Diane was an extraordinary woman. Everyone who had the privilege of meeting her was struck by her humanity and bravery in the face of unbearable suffering."

In the following year, Mrs Pretty applied to the Director of Public Prosecutions, in order to obtain immunity from prosecution for her husband. Acknowledging the family's 'terrible suffering', he refused.

Subsequent action in the High Court resulted in Mrs Pretty's being granted the right to challenge the DPP's decision. Her battle went right to the House of Lords in this country and then to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. That court did not agree that the Government had violated her human rights.

The seven judges ruled:"To seek to build into the law an exemption for those judged to be incapable of committing suicide would seriously undermine the protection of life, which the 1961 Suicide Act was intended to safeguard and greatly increase the risk of abuse."

Rachel Hurst, director of Disability Awareness in Action, said the organisation stood by its support of the European Court's decision not to allow Mrs Pretty's husband to help her commit suicide.
"The issue about Diane Pretty is that she wanted to kill herself, but I am afraid it would be very wrong for justice to say in certain circumstances people can die."