Tuscany region approved right-to-die law earlier this year.
A 64-year-old Italian man has become the first person to die by medically assisted suicide in Tuscany under a controversial new regional law regulating euthanasia.
The news, announced by the Luca Coscioni right-to-die association on Wednesday, concerned Daniele Pieroni who had Parkinson’s disease since 2008 and suffered from severe dysphagia, a difficulty in swallowing.
Pieroni, a writer, died in his home in Chieti on Saturday, almost two years after deciding “with clarity and serenity to end his life”, according to the Luca Coscioni association.
The case comes after Tuscany approved a law in February granting access to medically assisted suicide, becoming the first region in Italy to regulate euthanasia.
The right-wing government of premier Giorgia Meloni is currently challenging the law which the Tuscan regional council passed in the absence of national legislation regulating assisted suicide.
Euthanasia was effectively legalised in Italy in 2019 by the constitutional court which ruled that it is not always a crime to help someone in “intolerable suffering” to die, under certain conditions, including if the patient is being kept alive by life-sustaining treatment, suffering from an irreversible illness, and enduring suffering that the patient deems intolerable.
The constitutional court has repeatedly called on parliament to regulate assisted suicide at a national level however politicians have avoided the deeply divisive issue.
In 2022 the constitutional court rejected a petition calling for a referendum to decriminalise euthanasia, after right-to-die activists secured more than 1.2 million signatures in a petition.
