Italy's Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a man's appeal to remove a feeding tube keeping his daughter alive, weeks after a bitter row over brain-damaged Terri Schiavo divided the United States.
The Italian court confirmed an earlier ruling that called feeding Eluana Englaro, in a vegetative state following a 1992 car crash, a "necessary act."
It said a decision to remove the tube required "valuations of life and death that are rooted in concepts of an ethical or religious nature, which are extrajudicial," and said that the issue was also outside the powers of Englaro's father.
Some of doctors looking after the 35-year-old Englaro at a hospital in Lecco, a lakeside town in Northern Italy, have said she reacts to stimulus. Her father Beppino Englaro believes his daughter would want to die.
"Eluana has clearly expressed the wish to die in case of an accident that left her in a coma or a vegetative state," he said some weeks ago.
However, the Supreme Court ruled that since there was no specific evidence of the woman's views on life and death, it was impossible to say that her father's opinion reflected her own.
In Schiavo's case, her husband said it would have been her wish to die, while her parents pursued a legal battle to keep her alive. Her feeding tube was eventually pulled out by court order. Schiavo, who fell into a vegetative state after a cardiac arrest in 1990, died two weeks later.
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