If a Committee will evaluate our right to die

The assisted suicide bill, on which some sixty pages of amendments have already been tabled, is based on a proposal presented by the centre-right majority and adopted as the basic text by the Senate's Justice and Health Committees on 2 July 2025. This draft should clearly be read as a response to the regional law approved by the Region of Tuscany in February 2025, based on a popular initiative proposal promoted by the Luca Coscioni Association. Even on a superficial reading it is immediately obvious that the bill is more restrictive than the regional law. But that is not what I want to insist on here. After all, this is part of the political dialectic: the political majority is centre-right, the region in question centre-left.

Both the regional law and the national law under discussion are presented as responses to the Constitutional Court's rulings that had set certain conditions for assisted suicide to be accepted, namely the following: the presence of an irreversible pathology, a source of physical or psychic suffering, being kept alive by life-support treatment (a point later clarified by the Court), but at the same time being able to make free and conscious decisions. If these four conditions are met, assisted suicide would, after the Court's rulings, be compatible with our legal system. Compatible does not mean that it is a right in the strong sense. Nor does it mean that for the Court, in fact, it is; it is merely an activity that is deemed lawful under certain conditions.

And yet, while the regional law consistently follows the Court's dictates, the same cannot be said for the bill in question, and not only because it introduces a fifth condition not envisaged by the Court (the request for assisted suicide is in fact also conditional on being included in a palliative care programme). Of course, Parliament is sovereign, it does not necessarily have to follow what the Court has ruled, it could also pass a law that does not correspond to its indications, sooner or later facing a possible judgement of unconstitutionality. And from this point of view, one can even criticise the Court ruling for almost going so far as to legislate, in the sense of indicating what the legislature should do. It lays down conditions, procedures, so much so that the legislature would seem to have its hands tied. (Although it must be said that the Court had given the legislature time to intervene before doing so in a second ruling). The fact is that with respect to this law, if the current system remains in place, what has already happened with the law on medically assisted procreation, which, as is well known, despite the failure of an abrogative referendum, was rewritten by the Court, causing many prohibitions to be lifted, will happen.

There are, in fact, two points where the legislator even goes in the exact opposite direction to that indicated by the Court. The first is the establishment of a National Evaluation Committee, appointed by the President of the Council of Ministers, which through that Committee actually decides whether to accept or reject the patient's request. The second is the total exclusion of the National Health Service from the practice of assisted suicide. On the one hand, the entire procedure is centralised and entrusted to the prime minister as the last resort, and on the other, it is not clear by whom the terminally ill person who wants to commit suicide will be assisted, since it is excluded that 'the personnel in service, the instruments and the drugs, which the National Health System has at its disposal for any reason, may participate'. On the one hand, death is being nationalised and on the other, it is being privatised.

Just two points for reflection. If we want to avoid the medicalisation of death (and I believe that this is the core of this law that should be preserved) we should indicate an alternative path, also taking into account what, for example, happens in neighbouring Switzerland. Or find new ways, and it would seem right to do so because if the request for assistance to suicide is not a right in the strong sense, there is no reason why it should go through the National Health System. The law, in short, could in this respect limit itself to amending Article 580 of the Criminal Code in the sense indicated by the Court. Not least because the doctor's role should be limited to that of prescribing appropriate drugs, remaining otherwise extraneous to the execution of suicide. The problem cannot be solved by mere conscientious objection, indeed his professional ethics depend on it.