British euthanasia patients double in the last year

Between January 2003 and January 2006, an average of 14 people a year made the journey from the UK to the assisted suicide clinic Dignitas.

But since January last year, some 34 people have made the trip - more than double the previous figures.

The number of Britons to have ended their lives there now stands at 76.

Currently, British courts regard euthanasia as murder and can impose a penalty of life imprisonment while helping someone to commit suicide is also a criminal offence, punishable with a maximum 14-year jail sentence.

Rosie Brocklehurst, of Dignity in Dying, which campaigns for euthanasia to be allowed in the UK, said the figures showed there was a need for a change in the law.

She said: "It is appalling that the current law in the UK means that terminally ill British people who want to end their lives are being forced to travel to a strange country to do so."

But the campaign is controversial.

The debate over assisted suicide has been raging since 2001 - when Diane Petty, who suffered an advanced form of motor neurone disease, took her case to the European Court of Human Rights to be granted a right to die - and lost.

In 2004, Mr Justice Heady, sitting in the High Court, granted a terminally-ill woman, known as Mrs X, permission to travel to Dignitas to end her life.

Her case had come to court only because her local council had alerted the police to her intentions and taken out an injunction to stop her travelling.

But although supporters of euthanasia heralded the case a breakthrough to those campaigning for assisted dying, UK law remains unchanged.

The most recent attempt to change the law, the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, championed by Nelson Mandela's lawyer Lord Joffe, sought to legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live.

It was defeated in the House of Lords in May last year.

However,an alternative - Labour's new Mental Capacity Act - is seen by critics as the first step on the road to the legalisation of euthanasia.

The Act will allow us to draw up living wills. These will instruct doctors to withdraw treatment and let men and women die if they become too ill to speak or act for themselves.