Tuscany will not become the new
Switzerland for trips to access assisted suicide and die with
dignity, Governor Eugenio Giani said Wednesday after it became
the first Italian region to pass a regional law on the issue
Tuesday.
The regional law will only be a "spur" to the national
parliament to legislate on the basis of a 2019 ruling from the
Constitutional Court, and the regional law will also stick to a
strict set of parameters laid down in that ruling, said the
member of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
Giani also specified that the law will only come into effect
after a 120 day period for appeals against it to be filed, and
after the Constitutional Court has had its say too.
Asked if Tuscany was becoming a new Switzerland, Giani replied:
"No, I believe that Tuscany has only done a service to its
citizens".
"Fair, precise, objective rules have been established. We have
not gone beyond what the Constitutional Court prescribed; the
irreversibility of the scientifically documented pathology, the
dependence of the person on supportive treatments, in the
absence of which they would automatically die, the firm and
precise assessment of the capacity to understand and want by the
person directly involved and their explicit, clear, unequivocal
will.
"These are the principles of the Court, the Tuscan law acts as
an operational discipline for those cases for which medically
assisted treatment at the end of life is valid, established by
the Constitutional Court with sentence 242 of 2019".
Previously, Giani had underlined on the Sky Tg24 program Start
that "the Court has given indications on which the national
legislator should act with a law. "Then, whether in this
transitional phase we will be able to have legitimacy or not
with respect to the measure we have made, the Court will say.
"Parliament has often been reluctant but in the end it must act
and I hope it will do so as soon as possible. "In this sense,
our regional law has been a stimulus".
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