Euthanasia is once again illegal in Portugal, thanks to a ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court.
Since 2016, euthanasia legislation has bounced among Portugal’s governing bodies. This past January marked the third time legislators decriminalised euthanasia; the court case that followed was the second time the Constitutional Court struck down such a law.
In this recent decision, the court objected to imprecise language used in the law to describe the types of suffering that must be experienced for someone to qualify for euthanasia, citing the phrase “physical, psychological, and social.” The judges found it unclear, leaving doubts as to whether or not the person would have to be suffering in all three forms or only one.
Counsellor João Pedro Caupers explained:
The question at issue is whether or not a patient diagnosed with cancer with the prognosis of a very limited life expectancy, or a patient suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis who is not physically suffering (commonly understood as pain), has access to medically-assisted death that is not punishable.
This is not the first time that the court has found the euthanasia law too vague. Euronews reported in 2021 that the judges had found the requisite for “extreme suffering” in the previous iteration too loose, adding that the rules for applying euthanasia must be “clear, precise, clearly envisioned and controllable.”
However, the court did not at that time uphold the government’s duty to protect life. On the contrary, the majority of the court’s twelve judges denied that the right to life was “an insurmountable obstacle” for the law to pass.
“The right to life cannot be transfigured into a duty to live under any circumstances,” said the president of the court, João Pedro Caupers, in 2021.
Euthanasia proponents consider the problems identified in the latest ruling a matter of semantics that can be easily remedied. The governing Socialist Party supported the bill.
Chega and the rest of the political Right are calling for a referendum on the issue, a measure proposed in 2021 that was also struck down by the constitutional court.
