ABORTION rights campaigners welcomed yesterday a United Nations call to lift Ireland’s ban on the procedure.

A panel of experts from the UN’s Geneva-based human rights committee said Irish woman Amanda Mellet had been subjected to discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in the name of the law.

Ms Mellet was 21 weeks pregnant in November 2011 when medics told her the foetus would die in her womb or shortly after birth.

She travelled to Britain for an abortion but had to return home 12 hours after the procedure as she could not afford to stay longer.

The report said Ms Mellet had been forced to choose “between continuing her non-viable pregnancy or travelling to another country while carrying a dying foetus, at personal expense and separated from the support of her family and to return while not fully recovered.”

The UN ordered Dublin to compensate Ms Mellet and ensure she received adequate psychological treatment.

It also called for changes to the law, even if that meant repealing the Irish constitution’s eighth amendment, which protects unborn foetuses.

Abortion rights campaign Alliance for Choice Belfast chairwoman Kellie O’Dowd welcomed the UN panel’s findings and voiced hope that they would put on pressure on the Dail to change the law.

She pointed out that every year around 4,000 women from the republic and 1,000 from Northern Ireland travel to Britain to have an abortion at their own expense, suffering “untold stress and trauma.

“We in Ireland need free, safe and legal access to abortion and we need to trust women to know what is best for them and their families when faced with an unsupportable pregnancy,” Ms O’Dowd added.