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The Constitutional Court has established that the Tuscan law is legitimate to regulate assisted suicide, the practice by which under certain conditions one can independently administer a drug to die. However, he declared some parts of it illegitimate, which mainly concern the competences of the region, the times and methods of access to assisted suicide: they will need to be corrected so that the law can remain valid.
It is an important ruling, because it implicitly establishes that the regions, within certain terms, can legislate autonomously on this issue: it therefore largely contradicts the government’s appeal against the Tuscany law, which instead claimed that it was not a regional competence. Tuscany’s is the first regional law on the subject, introduced to make up for the lack of a national law on the subject.
More specifically, the Constitutional Court contests some articles of the regional law which encroach on areas of national competence, and others which establish the times for access to assisted suicide. For example, article 2 of the regional law identifies the requirements for access to assisted suicide by directly referring to two sentences of the Court itself: the Constitutional Court says that it is illegitimate because the regions cannot “crystallize in their own provisions legal principles affirmed by this Court”, because it is up to the State.
The Court then challenges other articles, for example parts of 5 and 6, because they provide such stringent time limits for verifying the requirements for access to suicide that, according to the Court, they do not allow the alternatives to be adequately considered. As Filomena Gallo and Marco Cappato of the Luca Coscioni association point out, they are technical findings that «do not exclude the duty of the Health Service [nazionale] to respond to people’s requests, nor the need for health administrations to operate within certain, reasonable and compatible times with the protection of the dignity and health of patients”.
In summary, the ruling of the Constitutional Court essentially says that the Tuscany Region was entitled to make a law on assisted suicide, although there is not yet a national law that uniformly regulates access to the procedure.
After coming into force on 11 February, in May the Tuscan law was challenged by the government, which had raised a conflict of competences and claimed assisted suicide as an issue on which to legislate at a state and not regional level. The ruling should therefore also apply in a similar way to a similar law approved in September by Sardinia which the government had said it wanted to challenge, and will probably also push other regions to adopt similar rules independently, given the delays and inconclusiveness of parliament.
In Italy, assisted suicide is legal by virtue of another ruling of the Constitutional Court in 2019: however, there is no law approved by parliament that establishes the times, methods and conditions with which this procedure should take place. For this reason, some regions have moved independently, so as to be able to more efficiently manage cases of assisted suicide that are submitted to local health authorities: they can do this because healthcare is partly a regional competence, even if the issue is indeed debated.
The right and centre-right parties in government have always declared themselves against assisted suicide and have long tried to hinder the attempts of regions such as Tuscany and Sardinia, administered by centre-left councils, to independently adopt a law to regulate the practice.
While the Court decided its constitutionality, the Tuscan law remained in force. Over the course of these months, two people have resorted to assisted suicide in Tuscany: a 64-year-old from Siena in June and a 40-year-old in September. The Florence court had also found a solution for “Libera” (fictitious name), a woman authorized to access assisted suicide but unable to self-administer the lethal drug because she was paralyzed from the neck down.
