New Delhi, Sept. 21: The Kerala law reforms commission has recommended that euthanasia or mercy killing be made legal in the state. The suggestion goes beyond a two-year-old proposal by the Law Commission of India.

The national commission had only recommended “withholding of life-support measures to terminally ill patients” after taking the patients’ informed consent. But it had said both euthanasia and assisted suicide should stay illegal.

Euthanasia is defined as anyone, who may or may not be a doctor, intentionally killing a terminally ill person by administering drugs. Assisted suicide refers to the patient, with help from a doctor, taking a drug to commit suicide.

The Kerala panel says either can be considered if a patient is suffering from unbearable physical or mental pain that is medically impossible to assuage. It, however, adds that written sanction should be taken from three state-recognised doctors.

The panel, headed by retired Supreme Court judge V.R. Krishna Iyer, has made the proposal in the form of a draft bill. The Kerala government may reject the suggestion, or it may table it as a bill that the Assembly may or may not pass.

If enacted, it could be challenged as unconstitutional in the Supreme Court, which has several times ruled that euthanasia violates the fundamental right to life and is not too different from murder or aid to suicide.

The Kerala panel has defined euthanasia as “deprivation of life by oneself or by any other person at the instance of the person whose life is lost, or by a medical practitioner doing any act or omission resulting in termination of life”.

It says: “The victim of suffering and his closest relatives, after taking responsible medical opinion about irrecoverability of pain-free normality, create the right to euthanasia. Solace, compassion, justice and humanism make euthanasia a legally permissible farewell to life in its misery and desperation.”

It also suggests the deletion of Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, which makes any attempt to commit suicide an offence.

The recommendation runs counter to a host of Supreme Court rulings. In Gian Kaur versus Punjab, a five-judge Constitution bench had held that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution was inconsistent with a “right to die”.

In an earlier case, the court had ruled that since euthanasia involved intervention by someone else, it indirectly amounted to abetting suicide — a criminal offence.

In Naresh Marotrao Sakhre versus Union of India, the court had said: “Euthanasia or mercy killing is nothing but homicide whatever the circumstances in which it is effected.”

The Kerala panel, however, argues that although the right to life is paramount, it also means the right to live in dignity, good health, secure medical aid and relief from distress. More than that, it means the right to a life free from escalating pain and suffering whose intensity frustrates the freedom of survival, it adds.