The Constitutional Council has today confirmed its decision concerning the law legalising assisted suicide and euthanasia referred to as "assistance in dying".
By ratifying the overall procedure, the Constitutional Council has failed to take a stand on the essential question being raised by this law: the deletion of the prohibition against intentionally causing death. The three reservations which it raised, concerning protected adults, the conscience clause for pharmacists and the freedom of specific private establishments, remain marginal in relation to the central stakes. They, in no way, alter the architecture of the text which institutes, for the first time in French law, the right to cause the death of a person.
Regarding people subject to legal protection measures, the Council specifies that the doctor must take into account the remarks expressed by the person in charge of the protection measures. Such reservation does not challenge the shocking radicality of the text: The final decision remains in the hands of the doctor, who in the last resort will be responsible for authorising a procedure leading to an irreversible act. Moreover, the essential recognition of a conscience clause for pharmacists and the possibility – subject to conditions – for certain establishments not to accept euthanasia and assisted suicide on their premises, cannot disguise the catastrophe which the validation of such a law represents for our health system.
This decision cannot hide the conditions under which the law was adopted, after being rejected three times by the Senate before being adopted by a narrow margin by the National Assembly, in a precipitate schedule, with a result which the head of the government appears not to have fully accepted, but with hindsight. The number and diversity of the appeals submitted to the Constitutional Council are indicative of the absence of consensus surrounding the text and, more profoundly, of the degree of unrest generated by the challenging of the founding prohibition of our society: that of deliberately causing death.
The parliamentary debates have revealed the impossibility of defining a framework based on objective criteria. Since the decisive question is not so much the limits which the law intends to apply, but rather the principle which it abandons: the prohibition against deliberately causing death, which until now established the coherence and solidity of the protections provided by our law.
According to Tugdual Derville, spokesman for Alliance VITA, "The fact that pharmacists and the heads of specific establishments are able to refuse to partake in this law cannot disguise the disaster of the constitutional validation of the lifting of the prohibition against killing. We are now mobilised for a new stage: the protection by all legal means of patients, their next of kin and carers from the deleterious impact of the so-called "assistance in dying", and to that end, the dissemination of a culture based on assistance to live, i.e. by the accompaniment of the most fragile (the aged, the dependent or the sick), the relief of all their suffering and the unconditional respect for their dignity."