The law creating a right to assistance in dying was published Wednesday in Official Journal in the wake of its promulgation by the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, after several years of debate.
This text, validated by the Constitutional Council last week with some reservations, creates a right to assisted dying, under several conditions, for certain patients, allowing them to administer a lethal product in the presence of a caregiver. If, and only if, the patient cannot physically perform the procedure, the caregiver can take care of it.
Several conditions must be combined. The patient must be an adult, French or a long-term resident, suffer from a “serious and incurable” illness in a terminal or “advanced” phase, suffer unbearably physically and be capable of expressing an informed choice until the last moment.
France joins Belgium, Switzerland and even Canada
A procedure, carried out by a single doctor but requiring other actors to be involved, must make it possible to determine whether a patient is eligible or not. Before caregivers are able to put the text, definitively adopted in Parliament in mid-July, into practice, the government will have to publish the necessary implementing decrees.
A relatively small circle of countries have already opened this right, from Belgium to the Netherlands via Switzerland, Canada and Uruguay.
In a decision rendered on Friday, the Constitutional Council, chaired by Richard Ferrand, considered that no provision of this law, considered a major societal reform of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term, violated the Constitution. The Head of State welcomed a decision “which completes an exemplary democratic debate”.
An unusual referral from the Prime Minister
Former MoDem MP Olivier Falorni, author of the bill, also welcomed “a very big step forward which is finally coming to fruition! » Conversely, the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation said it was “outraged” by this decision, followed by the association Les Éligibles and their caregivers who denounced “the total danger of this law for the most vulnerable”.
The text, which first gave rise to a citizens’ convention at the request of Emmanuel Macron and then to numerous legislative back-and-forths, awakens societal divisions, with broad opposition from religious circles as well as certain caregivers.
The five referrals – a high number – addressed to the Council further testified to these debates. One of them, unusually, came from the Prime Minister himself, Sébastien Lecornu, at the head of a government bringing together the Macronist camp – rather favorable to the text but not uniformly – and the Republicans – largely opposed.
