Oregon rebuke over anti-euthanasia move

The Bush administration received a sharp rebuke in federal court yesterday over its widely derided attempt to end physician-assisted suicide in Oregon, the only US state that sanctions euthanasia for the terminally ill.

The administration's ultra-conservative Attorney General, John Ashcroft, acting under the influence of the right-wing Christian right-to-life lobby, issued an order last November that sought to overturn Oregon state law on the grounds that doctors who helped patients to die were overstepping the ethical bounds of their profession.

His action prompted an immediate revolt among Oregonians, who had voted in two separate referendums in favour of the state's Death with Dignity Act. Critics of the Bush administration also accused Mr Ashcroft of hypocrisy, since conservatives like him usually champion the rights of states to make their own laws independently of the federal government.

In yesterday's court ruling overturning the Justice Department's order, District Judge Robert Jones of Portland accused Mr Ashcroft of attempting to "stifle an ongoing, earnest and profound debate in the various states concerning physician-assisted suicide".. He said the federal government lacked the authority to overturn Oregon law and scolded him for issuing his order with no advance warning.

The Death with Dignity Act has been used in only a few dozen cases since its introduction in 1997. It can be invoked only if the patient is deemed mentally competent and if two doctors agree that he or she has less than six months to live - safeguards that have prevented the flood of physician-assisted deaths opponents of the law once feared.

Oregon's political leaders expressed amazement that Mr Ashcroft could find time to issue his ruling on euthanasia given the all-consuming war on terrorism that he was conducting at the same time. They ascribed his commitment to his unbending right-wing Christian ideology - an ideology that has frequently pitted Mr Ashcroft against mainstream interpreters of the US constitution.

This is the second time in a matter of weeks that the Attorney General's authority has been challenged in court. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Washington struck down a Justice Department ruling that sanctioned closed immigration hearings for detainees rounded up in the wake of September 11. The judge said denying public and media access to the hearings without showing due cause was a violation of basic constitutional freedoms.