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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Touching off a heated debate over euthanasia, South Korea's sole medical group is pushing to give doctors the right to terminate treatment on incurable patients.

Mercy killings are illegal in South Korea but the Korean Medical Association, a lobby for 70,000 doctors, has drafted a new ethics code that would give doctors more discretion in determining the fate of patients suffering from unbearable pain with no hope to live.

The ethics code, the first of its kind in South Korea, will become formal when approved by the association's annual general meeting later this month.
``Even if the ethics code is adopted, it will still entail legal problems,'' said Choi Won-jun, an official at the Ministry of Health and Welfare. ``Whether it will be in conflict with the criminal law will have to be closely checked.''
Without a clear legal definition of mercy killing in South Korea, doctors have been uneasy when they treat patients who they believe are terminal and suffering unbearably with only a few days to live.

In a widely publicized case in 1998, a doctor in Seoul was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for allowing a terminally ill patient to go home and die without further treatment at the request of his wife.

If adopted, the new ethics code would allow doctors to discontinue treatment on terminally ill patients on their own judgment or when they are asked to do so in writing by the patients' families. It would also enable doctors to refuse demands for treatment by patients' families if they believe it's medically needless.

Local media said the new code may cause legal disputes when doctors refuse treatment desired by the patients' families.

The euthanasia dispute drew wide media attention in South Korea after the Netherlands this week became the first country to legalize mercy killings and assisted suicides for patients suffering unbearably with no hope of relief.
The Netherlands said it hoped the enactment will boost more campaigns for what they called the right to a dignified death.