Law took years to pass, now looks ‘dead in the water’
In spite of all the legal to-ing and fro-ing to get Portugal’s Euthanasia law onto the Statute books, a number of people – including the Pope – bitterly oppose it, and now Ombudsman Maria Lúcia Amaral says, on reflection, she believes it is unconstitutional (after all…)
President Marcelo did his best in the past to ensure the wording satisfied constitutionalists (which it seemed to have done last year).
Maria Lúcia Amaral however says she has received “three or four complaints”; “studied them; responded to them” and understands there is a basis for them.
As citizens do not have direct access to the Constitutional Court, the Ombudsman, in her capacity to defend and promote citizens’ rights, liberties and guarantees, must be the mediator between both parties.
Thus, she has asked the Constitutional Court to declare the law unconstitutional, which would render it ‘null and void’: any party insisting that euthanasia should be a right in Portuguese society will have to go ‘back to the drawing board’, and study the ‘grey areas’ that appear to persist.
They will be hugely technical.
According to Ms Amaral’s explanation at the congress “50 years of law in Portugal. Anatomy of a System in Transition”, the offending law takes “a step that is rare in comparative law“, adopting normative solutions without ensuring “real, present and effective alternatives”.
Whether she is right or not in her understanding of the shortcomings, is not up to Ms Amaral to say, she adds. “What I understand is that the arguments I presented were sufficient”.
The Ombudsman’s request to the Constitutional Court was presented three days before the elections – and comes at a time when the law, albeit promulgated, has yet not been regulated. PS Socialists had decided to include a question in the dossier of transition for the next executive.
This is the first Portuguese law on this subject, which is incredibly complex for a Catholic country.
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 adult person themselves, 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 for the purpose”.
The diploma was the result of the fourth decree approved by Parliament to decriminalise 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 Constitutional Court led to vetoes on the grounds of unconstitutionality, and in April last year, when faced with the fourth decree, the President of the Republic also 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 Constitutional Court for a successive review of the law, in a petition signed by 56 MPs, more than 70% of the party.
Source material: LUSA
