Euthanasia

The deliberate act of ending a person's life, typically carried out by a physician or other third party, to relieve the person's suffering, most often at the person's own request or, under some legal frameworks, with a substitute decision maker's consent. It is treated in criminal law as an unlawful killing, generally prosecuted as murder or manslaughter, in the great majority of countries, though a small number of countries, led by the Netherlands and Belgium since 2002, have adopted legislation exempting a physician from criminal liability when euthanasia is carried out within tightly defined procedural safeguards. Euthanasia is legally distinguished from assisted suicide, in which the dying person rather than a third party performs the final act, a distinction that matters for how a jurisdiction assigns criminal liability even where both practices are permitted.