SPAIN

Spanish Euthanasia Film is a Smash Hit in Venice

A true story of one man's fight for the legal right to die, by Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar, has proved the talking point of the Venice International Film Festival so far.

Amenabar's film Mar Adentro (Out to Sea) pulls no punches in telling the story of quadraplegic Ramon Sampedro but yet manages the trick of being an uplifting film about illness and death.

The young director and his cast received an extended ovation when they arrived for a press conference in Venice after a critics' screening yesterday which established the film as clear favourite for the festival's prestigious Golden Lion prize.

"There is no prize, no statue, that can live up to this," said actor Javier Bardem after waiting out the applause. Bardem plays Sampedro, who spent 30 bed-bound years wishing to bring his life to a dignified end, despite the well meaning efforts of those who loved him.

After losing a long battle in the Spanish court system for the legal right to assisted suicide, he eventually committed suicide after the publication of his book Letters from Hell in 1996.

Amenabar denies the film advocates euthanasia, although it is bound to revive debate in Spain, where it goes on release this weekend.

Spanish Doctors' Attitudes to V.E.
Report from Derecho a Morir Dignamente

A 2002 survey on doctors´ attitudes towards euthanasia shows surprising results for a Roman Catholic country.

In 1999, on the occasion of the work carried out by the Euthanasia Senate Committee after Ramon Sampedro's death, the Minister of Health at the time asked the official Center of Sociological Research (CIS) for a survey on doctors' attitudes towards euthanasia. The results have been made public now, after Vincent Humbert´s death (see France) by the liberal newspaper El País. The more relevant points of the survey are:

Nearly six of every ten doctors agree on legalizing euthanasia

41% only for competent terminally ill

18% for any competent patient either chronically or terminally ill.

31% do not agree.

The rest do not know or did not answer. The survey was carried our with interviews of 1,057 doctors aged up to 65 in April-May 2002.

Ramon Sampedro´s case is still at the UN Human Rights Committee. For more information about it click here.