The Ethics Committee of the Asl Marche, with an analytical and amply motivated evaluation, ascertained the existence of all the conditions established by the Constitutional Court sentence with sentence no. 242 of 2019, to exclude the punishment of assisting suicide requested by a quadriplegic immobilized in bed for another ten years.
It is useful to remember the essential content of that sentence. The Court has established and circumscribed the conditions under which aid in the execution of suicide cannot be considered a crime. In addition, of course, to the free and autonomous will of the person, we must deal with those suffering from an irreversible pathology, a source of suffering that they deem intolerable, capable of making free and conscious decisions. In these situations, with the refusal of treatments, even palliative ones, always legitimate, death would be reached with suffering for no short time.
The Court has not established a “right to benefit” for assistance in suicide by public health structures, to which it has exclusively assigned as a guarantee an activity of verifying the existence of these conditions, including an evaluation by the ethics committee.
Murder of the consenting party and euthanasia
This is the path followed in this case, considered with due attention by the Ethics Committee of the Marche, which examined and assessed the existence of all the individual conditions established by the Constitutional Court. The Court’s ruling is self-applicable, it has integrated the regulatory framework that is already in place, and indicates the legal framework in which one can and must move, and which Parliament can specify. The abrogation of the murder of the consenting party remains outside this field, as well as from the wider sphere of euthanasia, subject to a proposal for a referendum which, without prejudice to the freedom of consent, regardless of any limit or condition.