Court rules that legal action seeking right for doctor to be able to lawfully end Tony Nicklinson's 'intolerable' life should proceed

A high court judge has ruled that the right-to-die case of a man who can only communicate by blinking and wants his "suffering to end" should be allowed to proceed.

Tony Nicklinson, 57, who has locked-in syndrome, wants a doctor to be able to lawfully end his "intolerable" life after suffering a stroke in 2005 which left him able only to communicate by a voice-synthesiser that registers blinking. He launched legal action seeking the right for a doctor to intervene to end his "indignity" and have a "common law defence of necessity" against any murder charge.

His wife, Jane Nicklinson, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme, that death is the only way out for her husband. "We are asking for it to be legal for someone to end his life. The only way to relieve Tony's suffering is to kill him. There's nothing else that can be done for him," said the former nurse.

"He can't do anything. He's completely paralysed and he can't speak. If he has an itch I have to scratch it for him," she said.

She added that he did not want to die immediately but wanted to be able to choose.

"He just wants to know when the time comes he has a way out. It's what he wants, and we are behind him," she said. "If you knew the kind of person he was before, life like this is unbearable for him. He realises as he gets older things are going to get worse."

She added that the law had to change to keep up with advancing medical practice. "Twenty years ago Tony would have died. But people are being kept alive with such terrible conditions. Medical practice has become so much better but the law has not progressed with that. He says now if he had known what life would be like for him now, he would have just laid down and died and would not have called for help."

Paul Bowen, acting for Nicklinson at a recent hearing, said the Ministry of Justice had not given any arguments which were a sufficient "knock-out blow" to justify blocking the action.

Nicklinson's case was "an act of euthanasia or assisted suicide" and the only means "by which his suffering may be brought to an end and his fundamental common law rights of autonomy and dignity may be vindicated", he argued.

At a previous hearing, David Perry QC, representing the Ministry of Justice, said Nicklinson was asking the court to authorise and permit "the deliberate taking of his life".

He added: "That is not, and cannot be, the law of England and Wales unless parliament were to say otherwise."

Nicklinson, from Melksham, Wiltshire, suffered a massive stroke in 2005 on a business trip to Greece, leaving him paralysed from the neck down and only able to use his head and eyes to communicate. His wife told the Falconer inquiry into assisted suicide in December 2010 that her husband was someone who used to love conversation but now cried with frustration at the "sheer agony" of being unable to speak.

• Read the judgment (pdf).