Multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy has won a legal bid to force the British government to clarify the law on assisted suicide.
The House of Lords, the highest court in the country, ruled that the failure to make clear the circumstances in which a person could be prosecuted for accompanying someone abroad to commit suicide infringed her human rights.
Ms Purdy (46), from Bradford, northern England, wanted to force the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to give assurances her husband would not be prosecuted if he helped her go to a euthanasia facility overseas.
"I'm ecstatic - I feel like I've been given a reprieve. I want to live my life to the full, but I don't want to suffer unnecessarily at the end of my life," Ms Purdy said in a statement.
The law says assisting suicide is a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
Ms Purdy, who is wheelchair-bound, had been worried that her professional musician husband Omar Puente would be treated harshly by the authorities because he is Cuban. "This decision means that I can make an informed choice, with Omar, about whether he travels abroad with me to end my life because we will know exactly where we stand," Ms Purdy said.
Ms Purdy's lawyers argued that the DPP should be required to issue specific policy guidelines on suicide assistance prosecutions. But lawyers for the DPP said the law did not require a specific policy and that the provisions of the 1961 Suicide Act, which make aiding and abetting suicide punishable with a jail term, provided sufficient information.
London's High Court and the Appeal Court had previously rejected her case but she was allowed to challenge their verdicts in the Lords. The DPP will now have to provide that clarification, although the ruling does not change the law itself.
Since 1992, about 100 British citizens have ended their lives at the Dignitas facility in Switzerland - where assisted suicide is legal - without their relatives being prosecuted.
Campaign group Dignity in Dying said 34 Britons were currently preparing to travel abroad to die and 115 had gone to a foreign country for assisted suicide since 2002.