The Vatican's rigid opposition to euthanasia has come under fire from within its own ranks after it denied a religious funeral to a paralysed man who had asked to be removed from a life-saving respirator.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the influential former archbishop of Milan, said yesterday that terminally ill patients should be given the right to refuse treatments and that the doctors who assist them should be protected by law.

On December 20 a doctor in Rome unplugged the respirator which for many years had kept alive Piergiorgio Welby, who had muscular dystrophy.