Marcelo finds “indefinitions” in euthanasia and sends the law to the TC. angry parties

There is a growing feeling among the parties that the obstacles and doubts raised are just excuses to delay the approval of the law.

It was a scenario that many saw as likely, albeit with hopes that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa did not want to prolong the discussion around such a controversial topic, which enjoys the support of the majority in Parliament. Even so, the President of the Republic wasted no time and decided to send the diploma that would regulate the death medically assisted for the Constitutional Courtjustifying it with the old argument: the need to better define the conditions under which euthanasia can occur.

Sending the diploma to the Ratton Palace it happened, among other reasons, as a matter of “certainty of rights”. Another problem, resulting from changes made by the Parliament to respond to the concerns of the President of the Republic has to do with the disappearance of the expression “fatal disease“, a requirement that, as recalled by the Observerit was not mandatory but was provided for in the initial bill.

It turns out that the change is not to the liking of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who complains of a “less restrictive regime“. Still, the topic of “fatal disease” is not one of the points that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa asks the Constitutional Court judges to analyze. In the text sent to the judges, the President of the Republic highlights that the parties started to consider a “serious and incurable disease” as a “life-threatening disease, in an advanced and progressive phase, incurable and irreversible, which causes suffering from great intensity“.

Doubt arises precisely in the last concept, which is considered inaccurate.

As highlighted by the same source, the central question of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s position has to do, on the one hand, with the precision of the concepts, but also of the “densification of the law“, which the President of the Republic understands to be essential, especially “on a central issue in terms of rights, freedom and guarantees”. “As can be understood, as the Constitutional Court has already stated, a conceptual vagueness cannot be maintained, in a subject with this sensitivity, in which the greater legal certainty possible”.

On the side of the parties, there are those who think that the obstacles raised are just “apologies” to prevent the feasibility of the law, so this attitude was already “predictable“. Within the PS it is stressed that “the concepts are determined” at the level of what is “possible” to determine them by law, following the examples of other countries where euthanasia is already legal. “Hence the demand for a commission with several players”, recalled the same socialist source to the Observer.

no longer Left Blockthe view is that the doubts raised by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa do not reflect any “concrete” problem, with the President of the Republic clinging to “apologies” not to go ahead with the enactment of the law.