UPDATE 1-Doctors end life support for French patient in landmark right-to-die case

Doctors stopped giving food and water to French quadriplegic Vincent Lambert on Monday, lawyers said, renewing a fierce debate over the right to die that has split his family and country. The 42-year-old former psychiatric nurse has been in a vegetative state since a motorcycle accident in 2008. He has almost no consciousness but can breath without a respirator and occasionally moves his eyes.

His wife Rachel and some of his siblings say care should be withdrawn. But Lambert's Catholic parents, backed by other relatives, say he should be kept alive and have launched a series of legal bids to keep his care going. His doctors in the northeastern city of Riems said earlier this month that they would start withdrawing care after all legal avenues had been exhausted.

The medical team had now stopped feeding him food and water through a gastric tube and were administering sedatives, said Laurent Pettiti, a lawyer for Lambert's wife. "They are monsters", Lambert's mother Viviane cried from her car outside the hospital in Reims, BFM TV reported. Lambert's parents issued a last-ditch legal bid at the European Court of Human Rights on Monday. But the Strasbourg-based tribunal said there was no violation of his right to life and referred to a judgement it had already made in 2015 allowing doctors to take Lambert off life support.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday the decision on Lambert's fate did not rest with him. "But it is for me to hear the emotion that has been stirred and to respond," he added in his statement on Facebook. "All the medical experts have concluded that his condition is irreversible." Euthanasia is illegal in France, but in 2016 a law was introduced giving terminally ill patients the right to be put into continuous deep sedation (CDS) by doctors until death.

The law draws a distinction between euthanasia and CDS, making France the first country to legislate in such a way. Euthanasia is permitted in various forms in the Netherlands, Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg and Canada, while assisted suicide, which involves a doctor helping a patient to end their own lives, is permitted in several U.S. states.