Lisbon (EFE)
The decision was announced this Monday after the Portuguese president, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, requested its review in early January for a matter of “legal certainty.”
The president of the TC, João Pedro Caupers, explained that the decision was made by a “majority”, considering that the law gives rise to contradictory interpretations about the suffering required to qualify for euthanasia.
The norm establishes three types of suffering -physical, psychological and spiritual- and the TC defends that it is not clear if the three must be fulfilled at the same time or it is enough that there is one of them.
This “intolerable lack of definition” led the judges to veto the rule again, as they had already done in 2021.
Caupers also said that Parliament did not limit itself to correcting the aspects that the TC had indicated in 2021 and decided to go “further” by modifying the rule, which “had consequences.”
Minutes after the Constitutional Court announced its decision, the president announced that he is returning the rule to Parliament.
What does the euthanasia law in Portugal say?
The law, approved by Parliament last December, defined medically assisted death as that which “occurs by their own decision” of a person, “in the exercise of their fundamental right of self-determination” and when it is “practiced or helped by a professional Of the health”.
It would be applied exclusively in cases of adults, with “suffering of great intensity, with definitive injury of extreme gravity or serious and incurable illness.”
In addition, it set a minimum period of two months between the start of the process and medically assisted death and established mandatory psychological monitoring for the patient.
Third setback
It was the third time that the Assembly of the Republic approved the decriminalization of assisted death, which is still not a reality in the country due to vetoes by the Constitutional Court and the head of state himself.
The Portuguese Parliament approved a first version of the norm in January 2021, but the president sent it to the Constitutional Court.
The court rejected it on the grounds that it used “imprecise” concepts, although it noted that medically assisted death, by itself, is not unconstitutional and opened the door to a new parliamentary process.
The Chamber approved the law again in November of that year, with corrections and a new article to define some terms, such as medically assisted death, serious incurable illness, extremely serious definitive injury or suffering.
Rebelo de Sousa then applied a political veto because he had “contradictions” about the application situations and returned it to Parliament.
The head of state once again sent the third version of the norm, approved in December 2022, to the Constitutional Court, so that it could review whether it complied with the legal requirements that the court had pointed out in 2021.
