The Portuguese Constitutional Court rejected for the second time on Monday a law authorizing euthanasia, pointing to an “intolerable vagueness” in its drafting and sending the text back to Parliament, which has been trying to legislate in this direction for nearly three years.
Court judges concluded that the text did not comply with the fundamental law because it failed to clearly define the “suffering of great intensity” which could pave the way for a “medically assisted death”, they announced in a press release. read to the press.
The Constitutional Court had already rejected this law in March 2021, judging already at the time that it used too imprecise terms. Parliament will now be able to reformulate the text and submit it again for promulgation by the President of the Republic, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who had seized the Constitutional Court at the beginning of January.
The president resists
Parliament’s first vote in favor of decriminalizing euthanasia dates back to February 2020, but the legislator has since encountered resistance from the Head of State. A devout Catholic and former law professor, Rebelo de Sousa had vetoed a previous version of the law.
Socialist MP Isabel Moreira, one of the main voices in favor of the text, reacted to Monday’s decision by saying that it was only due to a “semantic problem” and that “most of the arguments of the President of the Republic were not admitted”.
“If it is a question of correcting a word, we will be there to do it,” she declared during a press briefing in Parliament. In the wake of Belgium and the Netherlands, a handful of European countries have so far legalized euthanasia.