The Constitutional Court’s presentation on Vox’s appeal to the euthanasia law rejects the arguments of the far-right party and endorses the content of the legislative text. A court with a progressive majority will foreseeably approve this week the presentation by magistrate Ramón Sáez, to which elDiario.es has had access, and which establishes that the Organic Law for the Regulation of Euthanasia “guarantees the right to self-determination of the person without leaving unprotected life, to which it provides a degree of protection that is not insufficient”.
The members of the Vox parliamentary group filed an appeal for unconstitutionality of the law in March 2021, focused on the fact that the text violated article 15 of the fundamental norm, according to which “everyone has the right to life and to physical and moral integrity”. . Faced with this, Judge Sáez concludes: “The Constitution does not accept a conception of the right to life and the protection of the good life disconnected from the will of its holder, and therefore, indifferent to his decisions on how and when to die” .
In this sense, the presentation appeals to the necessary intervention of the public powers in aid of evicted people or those who experience “extreme suffering”. “The State cannot evade its responsibility, as would happen if it tried to remain oblivious -through prohibition or lack of regulation- to the specific problem of those who need the help of third parties to effectively exercise their right in this type of situation, as this could lead the person to a degrading death”.
Faced with the “absolute protection of human life” that Vox demands from the State, both the Constitution and the European Court of Human Rights, Sáez reasons, do not accept that said protection “can oppose the free and conscious will of its owner ”.
In fact, it is article 15 to which Vox appeals that gives meaning to the Law that will endorse this Constitutional Court with a progressive majority. “The decision to end one’s life, freely and consciously adopted by someone who, being in full use of their mental faculties, is immersed in a situation of extreme suffering due to especially serious, irreversible and objectively verifiable medical causes, is one of the vital decisions protected by the right of self-determination of the person that derives from the fundamental rights to physical and moral integrity (article 15 CE) in connection with the recognition of the principles of dignity and free development of the personality (article 10)” , collects the paper by Sáez.
The Popular Party also appealed the Euthanasia Law approved by Congress after Vox. but based on the same alleged breach of article 15 of the Constitution. If the presentation by magistrate Ramón Sáez against Vox’s appeal is approved, the one presented by the PP is equally doomed to failure. This paper will be discussed in a plenary session to be held this week.
“Individual freedom for the adoption and autonomous implementation of private and intimate personal decisions of profound vital relevance enjoys prima facie of protection through the recognition of freedom as a superior value of the legal system”, the paper abounds.
And once this “right of self-determination” is recognized, it continues, the State has “the obligation to enable the necessary legal channels to allow the help of third parties that is necessary for the person immersed in one of the tragic situations to which it refers our prosecution can exercise their right to decide on their own death in conditions of freedom and dignity”.
That “everyone has the right to life” enshrined in article 15 of the Constitution “does not impose on the public powers – in the rapporteur’s opinion – a duty of unconditional protection that implies a paradoxical duty to live”. And this is reflected, he continues, in the constitutional text itself, as well as in the jurisprudence of the Court. Article 20, for example, “establishes criminal exemptions that justify the conduct of killing a third party in certain contexts and under certain requirements.”
In 1985, the Constitutional Court upheld several cases of abortion “even from the assumption of the value of human life,” the magistrate continues his reasoning. And in 1990 he endorsed feeding prisoners on hunger strike but “takes care to accentuate the limited projection of such endorsement from the perspective of affecting the right to life.”
“Other sentences consider that whoever kills himself acts in an area free of Law and therefore within the framework of the general principle of freedom and not in the exercise of a right,” adds Sáez. “Self-determination over one’s own body substrate prevents life protection from being activated through life-saving therapies against the patient’s will,” adds another of the rulings handed down in the paper, whose content was advanced by El Español and La Vanguardia.
Before concluding that Vox’s appeal should be rejected, the speaker leaves an additional conclusion: “The appellants’ argument that the person who commits suicide loses their dignity and freedom by giving up their livelihood cannot be accepted. The free and conscious decision to end one’s life constitutes an expression of the personal autonomy that is inherent to it, without an absolute understanding of the right to life as opposed to the dignity of the person who is in a tragic situation of death being conceivable. suffering”.
Before the Constitutional Court, Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, said on June 16, 2021 that the euthanasia law “is a defeat for civilization and a victory for the culture of death, of those who think that lives are more dignified.” what others; of those who have thrown in the towel of the duty that states have to offer palliative care to those who suffer the most.”
Palliative care ‘is not always an alternative’
The presentation by magistrate Sáez also refers to palliative care, dismantling the use of these treatments to avoid pain when death is irreversible. “They do not constitute an alternative in all situations of suffering in which the right to self-determination of euthanasic death operates, they are not, in particular, in cases of serious, chronic and disabling conditions in which a near death cannot be expected”, it states. the presentation.
In addition to the substantive arguments, Vox also appealed the way in which the law was approved. The extreme right argues that there is a “functional identity” between the parliamentary group that proposed the text and the Government, both of the same sign, therefore the obligation to consult mandatory bodies, such as the General Council of the Judiciary, when It is an initiative that arises from the Executive, it should not disappear in this case. “Functional identity –responds the paper– is language foreign to the Constitution, expression of a political appreciation, not a legal one, which is in no way consistent with the very rationality of parliamentary democracy”
In addition, the ultras denounced, its processing was “accelerated” with the excuse of the current state of alarm. The rapporteur considers this last argument “inconsistent” since the text was not even processed by the urgent procedure. “It is an absolutely indeterminate complaint that has no relationship” with the matter to be resolved, he adds.
Sáez must remember that the legislative proposals of parliamentary origin “do not require, neither in their presentation nor in their subsequent processing, the issuance of any preventive reports”, in response to Vox’s demand that the Bioethics Committee rule. “I would be [a esos órganos consultivos] a mandatory participation in the exercise of the legislative power of the State, which corresponds exclusively to the Cortes”, reads the paper.
