Assisted Suicide: An Italian Perspective

The unrestrainable evolution of medical science and technolo-gy is drastically changing health-care, enabling new medical procedures and remedies, which are increasingly intertwined with moral principles. The debate over bioethical issues has, indeed, raised new legal challenges as the transplant of ethical issues risks being unavoidably affected by philosophical, ideological and religious arguments. In Italy, a ruling of the Constitutional Court, no. 242/2019, declared the partial unconstitutionality of article 580 of the Italian Criminal Code, which prohibited assistance in suicide. Specifically, article 580 excluded the criminal liability for the person who, in the manner provided for in Articles 1 and 2 of the law 22 December 2017, no. 219, “facilitates the execution of intention of suicide, autonomously and freely formed, of one person kept alive by life-sustaining treatments and suffering from an irreversible pathology, source of physical or psychological suffering that he/she deems intolerable, but fully capable of making free aware decisions, provided that such conditions and methods of execution have been verified by a public structure of the national health service, following the opinion of the territorially competent ethics committee.” The paper aims to analyze the legal status of assisted-suicide in Italy, the issue of coscientious objection and future predictable legal challenges.