Without giving concrete dates, the parliamentary leader of the PS, Eurico Brilhante Dias, defended yesterday that the revision of the text decriminalizing medically assisted death will now be “faster”, as the legislative process will resume in the specialty and the socialists will today we will start discussing the amendments to be made to the articles.
It is already the third time that the deputies have resumed work on the euthanasia text. the target of two vetoes from the Constitutional Court (TC) and a political veto from the President of the Republic. Until now, working on the text in the specialty (article by article) always took a lot of time. After initial approval, the bills spent nearly a year in committee before reaching the final global vote. After the first leadership by the TC, in March 2021, the revised text did not go back to plenary until November of the same year. And given the new veto at the end of that month, then at the hand of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the diploma returned to Belém more than a year later, in January 2023 – a delay largely due in the latter case to be measured by the interruption of parliamentary work as a result of the parliamentary elections. Nevertheless, the new text was widely approved in June 2022 and the final global vote was not until six months later, in December.
Yesterday, Eurico Brilhante Dias said that “this week” (it will be today) some members of the parliamentary group will meet “to discuss not only the verdict, but also the explanations of vote attached to the judgment”. Then the PS will carry out “a consultation of the parliamentary group itself” to decide on the legislative changes it deems “pertinent”, so that the bill can be “voted again in the Chamber”. Along the way, as has been the case so far, the PS should try to negotiate changes with the other parties that signed the single final text, such as the Left Bloc, Liberal Initiative and PAN.
A question of “and” or “or”?
But the amendments to the document, to remedy the unconstitutionalities identified by the TC judges, may not be as straightforward as they may seem at first. It should be remembered that the TC declared the unconstitutionality of a standard that, by establishing “physical, psychological and spiritual suffering” as a condition for access to medically assisted death, leaves an “unbearable uncertainty” about whether these requirements are cumulative or alternative. In a first reaction, the PS called it a “semantic” issue, but the solution could turn out to be more complex then choosing the conjunction “and” (that is, the requirements are cumulative) or “or” (the requirements are alternative).
Filipe Neto Brandão, a lawyer who chairs the parliamentary budget and finance committee, has already come to warn that the issue is not easy. “I have read the judgment in its entirety on the conditions for non-criminalization of medically assisted death, and especially the various explanations of vote that comprise it, anyone who thinks that the mere addition of the conjunction “and” in the text is in itself likely to secure a future judgment on the constitutional conformity of a new decree of the AR will surely be mistaken,” wrote the PS Member of Parliament (with whom the DN tried in vain to contact) on Facebook.
The warning about the difficulty of responding to the TC’s verdict on non-compliance with the Constitution has in fact been expressed in one of the declarations of vote for the verdict, signed by four judges who voted against the declaration of unconstitutionality – Mariana Canotilho, António Ascensão Ramos, Assuncao Raimundo and José Eduardo Figueiredo Dias. The central problem of this argument is that this question is unsolvable. The concept of suffering – a holistic state by nature, with different, interrelated and complementary dimensions – hardly lends itself to a full definition, in legislative terms,” the judges write, pointing to a “auditing standard that cannot be adhered to without running the risk of creating space for new and different criticisms of the law, in an endless spiral of possible objections”. The explanation of vote underlines that “adjectives aside, doubt will remain as to whether any of the dimensions of suffering alone is sufficient justification for compliance with the legal presumption of access to medically assisted death”. Rather, “explicitly requiring their cumulation creates a situation of administrative discretion, permitting the omission of a range of situations which the legislature has clearly intended to include within the subjective scope of the law” – people with “serious injury and widespread disabling, but painless”. And, “if the current “and” is replaced by an “or”, the legislator risks being confronted with claims that he has broadened the range of circumstances in which medically assisted death can be applied to such an extent that henceforth results in the breach of the fragile balance between fundamental rights in tension”, the four judges warn.
Source: DN
