Senior Labour MP and former UK Health Minister Patricia Hewitt has backed legislation to protect suicide tourists – as a first step towards the legalisation of euthanasia.

Ms Hewitt wants to change the law to protect relatives of terminally-ill people who travel to Switzerland to kill themselves in a suicide clinic. Currently there is a 14-year jail sentence for a conviction for assisted suicide, although the government has refused to enforce it. She has tabled an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill – and Prime Minister Gordon Brown has signalled that he may allow a conscience vote.

About 100 Britons have travelled to Switzerland to commit suicide there.

Ms Hewitt said MPs from all parties believe the law should now be changed and that more than 100 of them have signed a Commons motion calling for the issue to be debated.

"In the long term we need a bill to change the law to allow terminally ill, mentally competent adults suffering at the end of their lives the choice of an assisted death, within safeguards, in this country," she said. "In the meantime, I hope that the amendment I have tabled will prompt the long overdue parliamentary debate necessary to bring the law on assisted suicide in line with the practice of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the courts."

Dr Peter Saunders, of the lobby group Care Not Killing, warned that relaxing the law could lead to abuses. He told the Daily Mail: "The Government is, commendably, trying to protect vulnerable people by tightening up the Suicide Act to outlaw internet websites that encourage suicide. And yet here we have the euthanasia lobby trying, at the same time and in the same Bill, to encourage suicide by removing any risk of prosecution for anyone assisting someone to go abroad for euthanasia or assisted suicide.

"The result would be a law that discouraged suicide with one hand and encouraged it with the other. That would be farcical as well as tragic. The law has an important deterrent effect and that means the cases we see are those involving resolute and self-confident people who haven’t been coerced. Take away that deterrent and we would soon start to see cases of abuse and an opening of the floodgates."

However, Lesley Close, who accompanied her terminally-ill brother John to Switzerland for an assisted suicide in 2003, welcomed the proposed law change. "Knowing before I started the process that what I was doing was not likely to attract a prosecution... that reassurance would have been tremendously helpful," she said. ~ Daily Mail, Mar 21