At the end of an arduous legislative process, the Portuguese Parliament on Friday voted to finalize a law decriminalizing euthanasia that will place Portugal among the few countries allowing a person suffering from a terminal illness to put an end to their suffering.
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The law was adopted thanks in particular to the Socialists, who enjoyed an absolute majority: 129 deputies voted in favor and 81 against, out of the 230 members of the Assembly.
“We are confirming a law that has been voted on several times by very large majorities,” said Socialist MP Isabel Moreira, one of the main voices for decriminalizing euthanasia.
A parliamentary majority led by the ruling Socialist Party has voted to decriminalize euthanasia four times in the past three years. But the text then met with reservations from the Constitutional Court and President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a conservative and staunch Catholic.
To overcome the last veto by the head of state, who now has eight days to promulgate the law, the Socialists had decided to vote for the same text a second time.
After publication of the implementing regulations, the law could come into force in the autumn, according to estimates by the local press.
The text of the law has been reworded several times to take account of remarks made by the President, who twice vetoed it and after being challenged twice by the Constitutional Court, notably for “inaccuracies”.
The new version of the law now stipulates that euthanasia is only permissible if “medical suicide is not possible due to the patient’s physical incapacity”.
To defend his last veto, Mr. Rebelo de Sousa had asked MEPs to indicate who was authorized to “certify” this impossibility. But this time the parliamentarians refused to change the text.
The issues raised by the head of state could be clarified “in the regulations for the application of the law”, emphasized Catarina Martins, leader of the Left Bloc (BE, far left).
If the law is approved by Parliament, “it will not be a tragedy,” admitted Mr. Rebelo de Sousa, believing it would “pose no constitutional problems”.
For both supporters and critics of this law, the parliamentary vote will not end public debate on this contentious issue in a country with a strong Catholic tradition.
“The passage of this law was relatively quick compared to other large countries,” said Paulo Santos, a member of the “right to die with dignity” movement.
But “the fight doesn’t stop there” because, he notes, many doctors are risking pleading conscientious objections not to practice euthanasia, as some are doing in the context of abortion, which was approved by a referendum in 2007 has been legalized.
“It is to be expected that euthanasia will generate even more resistance,” he told AFP.
For their part, opponents of the decriminalization of euthanasia regret that the issue was not the subject of a referendum and hope that the constitutional court will be called again by opposition parliamentarians.
“It’s a whim of the deputies who didn’t want to listen to anyone,” argued José Seabra Duque, a member of the Portuguese Federation for Life.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide are now legal in a few European countries, such as the Benelux countries, which were the first to legalize them, and neighboring Spain.