A Seoul court Friday accepted a family's request to stop treatment for a woman lying in a vegetative state in an unprecedented ruling that approved mercy killing in South Korea without the patient's consent, according to Yonhap News.

The Seoul Western District Court ordered feeding tube and life support to be removed from the 75-year-old woman, identified only by her surname Kim, saying she has no chance of recovery and her desire to stop treatment can be inferred.

"Considering her hopeless state, the expected years left in her life and her current age, it is assumed that Ms. Kim would have expressed her intent to die a natural death with the life support removed rather than remain in her current condition," Judge Kim Cheon-su was quoted as saying in the verdict.

The decision answered to a long-debated question in South Korea of whether authorities can infringe upon the right to live of the terminally ill when their family demands it.

In 1997, a court convicted a family of murder and a hospital of assisting in the crime for removing a ventilator from a comatose patient. Physicians have since shunned the practice while practical reasons for assisted death were raised by patients' families.

Friday's ruling not only approved a mercy killing for the first time but also did so without the patient's consent.

Mercy killings, also called "death with dignity," are permitted in some countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand and the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington, but only when the patient had given consent.

In Kim's case, she had not said how she wanted to die. Considering medical opinion that her chance of survival was virtually non-existent and the family's testimony that she wouldn't have liked to be a burden to her children, the court inferred her presumed intent to die.

Shin Hyun-ho, representing the family, said in a hearing, "No law has been legislated about mercy killing, and there's no regulation in the public health insurance law to prevent pointless life-extending treatment. Such circumstances are a violation of one's constitutional right to happiness and right to self-determination as a patient."

Kim's children had sought court approval for her physician-assisted death after she sustained cerebral damage and fell into a coma while receiving a lung examination in February.

The Severance Hospital had refused the family's demand to end her life. The children filed a civil suit against the hospital in June.

The hospital has yet to decide whether to appeal or remove the life-extending tubes from the patient as ordered, said its legal affairs official, Yoon Jong-tae.

Medical circles hailed the verdict.

"Our position is death with dignity should be permitted in cases in which the patient doesn't want to be a burden to his or her family and the family doesn't want their beloved to continue suffering," Kim Joo-kyung, spokesman for the Korean Medical Association of doctors, was quoted as saying.

The Catholic community, which opposes euthanasia, accepted the ruling as helping one end life in a painless manner. The Vatican allows treatment to be withdrawn for terminally ill patients who receive no therapeutic benefit from high-cost, life-extending care.