This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Vincent Lambert, the man at the centre of a row over right-to-die legislation in France, died in hospital on Thursday more than a week after doctors removed his hydration and nutrition tubes, his family told Agence France-Presse.

“Vincent died at 8.24an (06.24 GMT) this morning,” Lambert’s nephew François said.

Lambert, 42, was involved in a near-fatal car crash in 2008 that left him a quadriplegic with severe brain damage, which doctors had long said was irreversible.

Left in a vegetative state, the question of whether to continue keeping him alive artificially divided his family and the nation.

Doctors at a hospital in the northern city of Reims began removing the tubes on 2 July while keeping Lambert heavily sedated after a protracted legal battle that has raged in the highest courts in France and Europe.

The case rekindled a charged debate over France’s right-to-die laws, which allow so-called “passive” euthanasia for severely ill or injured patients who are being kept alive artificially with no chance of recovery.

In May, even Pope Francis got involved, tweeting that it was necessary to “always safeguard life, God’s gift, from its beginning until its natural end”.

Lambert’s wife, Rachel, who is his legal guardian under French law, had said her husband made clear even before his accident that he would not want to be kept alive artificially, though this was never put in writing.

Multiple medical assessments ordered by the courts over the years found that the former psychiatric nurse, who was poised to become a father shortly before his accident, had no chance of recovering.

But his parents, devout Catholics who between them have nine children, had over the years successfully challenged five different attempts by doctors to halt his life-support.

The last time they tried to do so was in May, but it was quickly overturned by a Paris appeals court.

That ruling was then taken to France’s top appeals court, which on 28 June said doctors could legally end Lambert’s life support in what was hailed as a definitive final judgment by lawyers for his wife.

With their efforts spurned by the highest courts in France as well as by the European court of human rights, his parents threatened to file charges of “murder” when their son died.

On 1 July, Lambert’s mother, Viviane, turned to the UN human rights council in Geneva in a last-ditch plea for help.

“Without your intervention, my son, Vincent Lambert, will be euthanised because of his mental handicap,” she said. “He is in a state of minimal consciousness but he is not a vegetable.”

But by Monday, the couple had accepted that the death of their son was now “unavoidable”.

“We have nowhere else to turn and now it’s too late. Vincent is dying,” they said in a statement through their lawyers sent to AFP,adding that his condition was now “medically irreversible”.

In early May, the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities (CRPD) also asked France to keep Lambert alive while it conducted its own investigation into his fate, but the government said it was not legally bound to abide by the CRPD request.