The Portuguese Constitutional Court rejected this Monday for the second time a law that authorizes euthanasia, pointing out an “intolerable vagueness” in its wording and returning the text to Parliament, which has been trying to legislate in this direction for almost three years.
The judges of the Court concluded that the text did not comply with the fundamental law because it did not clearly define “suffering of great intensity” that could pave the way for a “medically assisted death”, they announced in a statement read to the press. . The Constitutional Court had already rejected this law in March 2021, judging at the time that it used too imprecise terms.
reformulation
Parliament will now be able to reformulate the text and submit it again to the promulgation of the President of the Republic, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who had seized the Constitutional Court at the beginning of January. The first vote in Parliament in favor of decriminalizing euthanasia dates back to February 2020, but since then the legislator has encountered resistance from the Head of State. A devout Catholic and former law professor, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had vetoed an earlier version of the law.
The socialist deputy Isabel Moreira, one of the main voices in favor of the text, reacted to the decision on Monday saying that it was due solely to a “semantic problem” and that “most of the arguments of the President of the Republic were not admitted “. . “If it’s about correcting a word, we’ll be there to do it,” she said during a news conference in Parliament.
After Belgium and the Netherlands, a handful of European countries have so far legalized euthanasia.
Source: BFM TV
