The decriminalization of medically assisted death will not go until the final global vote, in the Assembly of the Republic, after the process of discussing the state budget for 2023, which will not be completed until the end of November. The final vote in the plenary is therefore postponed to the end of November/beginning of December.
A situation arising from the request made today by the PS for the postponement of the vote on the specialty (article by article) of the proposal that has been in consensus in recent months, in a working group, between PS, Left Bloc, Liberal Initiative and PAN.
The text should have been voted on in the parliamentary committee on constitutional affairs on Wednesday morning, but the PS asked for the vote to be postponed. As Parliament is about to open the budget process – the general discussion on the OE2023 starts this afternoon – vote can only take place after the final vote on the budget, which is scheduled for 25 November.
The PS, through Deputy Joana Sá Pereira, coordinator of the socialists in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, justified the request for postponement with “obvious reasons”, without explanation.
According to a source in the direction of the Socialist Bank, the postponement is due to the fact that the PS intends to a “thorough analysis” of the text, which would not be possible if this was already the vote, as it would be voted on tomorrow, with the state budget for 2023 (last available date before the end of November): “The text lacks a thorough analysis, there is no time to do it”.
According to the same source, after what happened to the latest diploma on the decriminalization of medically assisted death – that different expressions have been used about the situations in which euthanasia will be allowed, in what was the main argument for the veto of the president of the Republic – the management of the group wants to ensure that there is no room for doubt about the wording.
The joint text agreed by the four parties was already on the agenda for a vote last week, but was then postponed at Chega’s request.
On June 9, there was a general vote on the decriminalization of medically assisted death. Picked up the PS diploma, the most voted of the four on the table 128 votes in favour, five abstentions and 88 against, with the proposals of the different parties being quite similar, with only one surgical change to override Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s veto. Although not in the sense intended by Belém, since the parties have opted for the term “serious and incurable” disease as a condition for requesting medically assisted death, they delete the expression “fatal disease” from the pleadings.
During the specialist work, which resulted in a diploma signed by the four parties, some substantial changes were made from the original texts, with the replacement text setting minimum and maximum time limits from the time of application to the completion of the process.
Another change concerns the mandatory psychological follow-up of the medically supervised death applicant, unless the applicant expressly rejects this.
Source: DN
