More than 15 years after the death of Eluana Englaro, which occurred on 9 February 2009 at the age of 39, 17 of which were spent in an irreversible vegetative state after a very serious road accident, the Court of Auditors sentenced the former Director General of Health on appeal of Lombardy Carlo Lucchina to pay the treasury approximately 175 thousand euros that the Region had had to compensate her father, Beppino Englaro, who had been forced to transfer his daughter to a health facility in Friuli where he died.
It was a “personal and ethical conception of the right to health”, writes the Court of Auditors, that pushed Lucchina to prevent Eluana from interrupting the treatment that kept her in a vegetative state. “It was not a conscientious objection, but the directives also received from the regional attorney’s office were applied”, commented the former director, who will evaluate whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Beppino Englaro, who fought for years and years to respect his daughter’s wishes, today tells ANSA that “I knew I had a right and it was clear that they were hindering it, so much so that I had to leave the region. Now it’s their problem, I’m justice I had to do it myself, always within the law and in society, they committed something they shouldn’t have committed. Everything was clear to me even then, I had to ignore them and go my own way.”
In 2008, the year before Eluana’s death, her father was denied the possibility of interrupting the artificial feeding that kept his daughter alive by the general director Lucchina, despite the fact that in 2007 the Court of Cassation had established that any individual can refuse treatment to which he is subjected if he considers them unsustainable and degrading, and in 2008 the Court of Appeal of Milan authorized the interruption of treatment.
When Beppino Englaro, in his capacity as guardian, asked for the suspension of nutrition for his daughter, the director signed a note which said that the health facilities take care of the care of patients, which includes nutrition, and consequently the health workers who had they been suspended they would have “failed to fulfill their professional obligations”. Englaro turned to the TAR which accepted his request, but the Region did not carry out the sentence and a month later Eluana died in a facility in Udine.
For Gilda Sportiello, deputy of the M5S, it is an “emblematic sentence” while protesting Brothers of Italy: Ignazio Zullo, group leader in the Health commission of Palazzo Madama, explains that Lucchina’s sentence “is horrifying” because “it prevented Eluana Englaro from being interrupted the treatment that kept her alive, defending the sacred right to live”. “Fifteen years have passed since that dramatic event and there is still no law regulating the end of life”, notes the group leader of the Democratic Party in the Lombardy Region Pierfrancesco Majorino.
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