Italy was torn by a right-to-die row on Thursday after a groundbreaking supreme court ruling that said a woman in a vegetative state for the last 16 years could be taken off her life-support machine.
Catholic politicians were quick to condemn the ruling on Eluana Englaro and promised a law that would reverse it.
''A section of the magistrature refuses to protect human life and favours forms of euthanasia, imposing its view in violation of existing laws,'' said Interior Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano.
''It is up to parliament to restore sovereignty to the people with a pro-life choice,'' he said.
Isabella Bertolini of Premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom Party accused the Cassation Court of ''signing Eluana Englaro's death warrant and opening a deep wound in the country which will be hard to heal''.
''This sentence affirms a culture of death that we reject with force and indignation,'' she said, adding that the ruling set ''a dangerous precedent for thousands of terminally ill patients''.
Luca Volonte' of the centrist Catholic UDC party said ''the Cassation Court has authorised the first state homicide''.
In the face of the attacks, the Italian judiciary's self-governing body started drafting a suit to protect the Court of Cassation against political attacks.
''We are preparing a suit to defend the autonomy and independence of the magistrature,'' said a councillor on the Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM).
The government's bioethics spokesperson, Welfare Undersecretary Eugenia Roccella, said the government had no power to intervene but no one was obliged to carry out the sentence.
She appealed to the ''sense of responsibility'' of Italy's medical fraternity and suggested that Beppino Englaro ''might decide to reconsider''.
Not all politicians condemned the verdict.
Donatella Poretti of the opposition Democratic Party welcomed the sentence and urged parliament to enshrine it in Italian law.
''We need a law that will remove the need for other Beppino Englaros to fight for years through the courts,'' she said.
The Cassation Court confirmed a lower court verdict that - for the first time in Italy - authorised doctors to switch off the life support system of Eluana Englaro, a 36-year-old woman trapped in an irreversible coma for the past 16 years.
The court rejected an appeal from Milan prosecutors, saying it was ''inadmissible'' because the case did not concern the general interest, as the prosecutors argued, but individual rights.
The judicial landmark was hailed by the woman's father, Giuseppe Englaro, who has been fighting for ten years against Catholic officials and politicians who follow the Vatican's line that removing life support is euthanasia.
''(This) is confirmation that we live in a state ruled by law,'' Englaro said.
Eluana's lawyer Franca Alessio called the sentence ''perfect'' and said she did not see problems in finding a clinic where her charge could be allowed to die.
The neurologist who has been treating Eluana, said procedures to take her off the machine could start ''in a few days'' in one of three facilities in the north of Italy which have already said they were willing to end her life.
The head of the Italian association of reanimation doctors, Vincenzo Carpino, welcomed the ruling, noting that ''the vegetative state has lasted nearly 20 years and the parents' right to carry out their daughter's wishes must be respected''.
There was no immediate reaction from the Vatican, which said earlier this week that turning off Eluana's life support would be ''an inhuman monstrosity and murder''.
LONG BATTLE, LEGAL VOID.
Englaro has appeared on TV frequently in the last decade, asking officials to free his daughter from what he says is ''the inhumane and degrading condition in which she is forced to exist''.
He argued that Eluana, who was left brain dead in a car crash in her Lombardy hometown of Lecco in 1992 when she was 19, said plainly during her life that she would not wish to live in a vegetative state.
He has also expressed concern about what will happen to her when he himself dies.
Political observers note that there is currently a legislative void in Italy on issues such as living wills and related end-of-life questions. Courts have not felt they have the authority to take such sensitive decisions without clear backing from the legislature.
Critics of the decision to turn off the life support system have accused judges of sneaking in euthanasia through the backdoor.
There have been bipartisan moves in parliament to legislate in the case but so far they have come to nothing.
The Englaro case has often been compared to that of American Terry Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman whose case sparked a worldwide debate over end-of-life issues.
Schiavo died in March 2006 after her feeding tube was removed at court orders and over the objections of her parents.
