End of life, the Consulta partially accepts the government's appeal on the Tuscany law

Some of the provisions of the Tuscan regional law are illegitimate, but at the same time the government's censure of the internal regulatory system is rejected. The Constitutional Court, with sentence no. 204, has partially upheld the government's appeal against the Tuscany Region's law on the end of life, which regulated the organisational procedures for implementing its previous pronouncements on medically assisted suicide.

Tuscany's regional law of 2025 aimed to fill an application gap by providing for the establishment of multidisciplinary commissions at the health authorities, the definition of a procedure for the submission and evaluation of requests for access to medically assisted suicide, the involvement of ethics committees, the indication of deadlines for verifications, and the possibility of guaranteeing the necessary health care, also through additional regional resources with respect to the essential levels of care.

However, the Court declared numerous provisions unconstitutional, limited to specific articles, paragraphs or periods, which were deemed to exceed regional competences. The articles that attributed excessively broad regulatory powers over the entire procedure to the Region and the health commissions were struck down, to the point of configuring an autonomous regulation of medically assisted assistance. In particular, the Constitutional Court censured the provisions that allowed delegations in decisive passages, that defined in a binding way the modalities of implementation of the service, and that concentrated in the regional bodies an overall control over access and execution.

At the same time, the Court found foundless the questions raised against the law as a whole and against the provisions that are limited to the organisation of the health service, recognising that the regions may intervene to implement constitutional rulings, provided that they do not encroach on areas reserved to the competence of the state.

The Court considers that, as a whole, the regional law is attributable 'to the exercise of concurrent legislative power in the field of health protection' and pursues the aim of 'laying down rules of a purely organisational and procedural nature, in order to regulate in a uniform manner the assistance by the regional health service to persons who - finding themselves in the conditions established by this Court in Judgment 242 of 2019 - the Dj Fabo/Cappato judgment - as further specified in Judgment 135 of 2024 ask to be helped to die'.