The Ombudsman explained today that she asked the Constitutional Court (TC) to declare the law on medically assisted death unconstitutional after receiving some complaints that she considered well-founded.
“I did this because I received complaints. I studied them, responded to them (…) and understood that there were grounds,” explained Maria Lúcia Amaral today, speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Congress “50 Years of Law in Portugal. Anatomy of a System in Transition”, which is taking place at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon.
In the petition, published last week, the ombudsman states that the law regulating the conditions under which medically assisted death is not punishable is contrary to the Constitution and aims to take “a step that is rare in comparative law”, adopting normative solutions without ensuring “real, present and effective alternatives”.
Asked why she had submitted the request, Maria Lúcia Amaral began by stressing that “citizens don’t have direct access to the TC” and that her role, as ombudsman, is “to mediate between citizens and the court”.
After evaluating them, he felt that the “three or four complaints” were sufficiently substantiated.
“Whether I’m right or wrong is not for me to say. What I understood was that the arguments I presented were sufficient,” he added, adding that the request was submitted last week, three days after the legislative elections that gave the PSD victory, only because it took time to study the matter.
The euthanasia law was promulgated on May 16, 2023 by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, but is awaiting regulation, after the PS government decided to include the issue in the transition dossier for the next executive.
This is the first Portuguese law on the subject, which states that “medically assisted death can only occur by euthanasia when medically assisted suicide is impossible due to the patient’s physical incapacity”.
In the new law, which amends the Penal Code, “medically assisted death is considered not to be punishable when it occurs by the decision of the person themselves, of legal age, whose will is current and repeated, serious, free and informed, in a situation of great suffering, with a definitive injury of extreme severity or a serious and incurable illness, when practiced or assisted by health professionals”.
Medically assisted suicide is defined as the “administration of lethal drugs by the patient himself, under medical supervision”, and euthanasia as the “administration of lethal drugs by a doctor or health professional duly qualified to do so”.
The diploma was the result of the fourth decree approved by Parliament to decriminalize medically assisted death under certain conditions, after Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa sent the first decree to the Constitutional Court in February 2021, vetoed the second in November of the same year, and sent the third for preventive review in January.
The two submissions to the TC led to vetoes on grounds of unconstitutionality, and in April last year, when faced with the fourth decree, the President of the Republic vetoed it, but dismissed doubts about its constitutionality, pointing out only “a problem of precision” in two specific points.
In November, a group of PSD MPs submitted a request to the TC for a successive review of the law, in a petition signed by 56 MPs, more than 70% of the caucus.
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