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Sardinia has become the second Italian region to approve a law granting access to medically assisted suicide, following a vote by the regional council on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Euthanasia was effectively legalised in Italy in 2019 by the constitutional court which has repeatedly called on parliament to define how it should be regulated.<\/p>\n
However MPs have avoided the deeply divisive issue and there remains no legal framework at a national level to regulate assisted suicide.<\/p>\n
In the absence of nationwide guidelines, several regions have taken steps to regulate assisted suicide on their own (they can do so because healthcare is partly a regional responsibility).<\/p>\n
The Sardinian law was approved with 32 votes in favour, 19 against and one abstention.<\/p>\n
Most councillors from the centre-left coalition that had supported regional president Alessandra Todde voted in favour, along with one opposition councillor from the centre-right Forza Italia.<\/p>\n
The bill, proposed by the Luca Coscioni right-to-die association, defines how assisted suicide requests should be handled by the regional health service, with a medical panel tasked with evaluating individual requests within specific time frames.<\/p>\n
In 2019 Italy’s constitutional court ruled that it is not always a crime to help someone in \u201cintolerable suffering\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
However in 2022 the constitutional court rejected a petition calling for a referendum\u00a0to decriminalise euthanasia, after right-to-die activists had secured more than 1.2 million signatures in a petition.<\/p>\n
Tuscany was the first Italian region to pass right-to-die legislation, in February, and since then two people have died by medically assisted suicide in the region.<\/p>\n
In May, however, Giorgia Meloni’s government challenged the Tuscany law in the constitutional court, arguing that assisted suicide is a matter for national, not regional, jurisdiction, and therefore the law should not be valid.<\/p>\n
The government’s decision is seen as primarily political, given that the right-wing and centre-right parties that support it are generally opposed to euthanasia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sardinia follows in footsteps of Tuscany by approving right-to-die law in the absence of national legislation. Sardinia has become the second Italian region to approve a law granting access to medically assisted suicide, following a vote by the regional council on Wednesday. Euthanasia was effectively legalised in Italy in 2019 by the constitutional court which<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4904,2547,3259,10291,10184,12763,4905],"class_list":["post-35255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eventi","tag-assisted","tag-italy","tag-law","tag-pass","tag-region","tag-sardinia","tag-suicide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/polinex.cluster021.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}