More than a million people call for referendum in Italy on euthanasia

About 1.2 million people signed a petition delivered this Friday to the Supreme Court of Italy for a referendum on euthanasia, given the legal vacuum in the country , informed the promoters of the initiative.

“More than a million people asked to be able to finally decide on what the policy has not done yet, among the clandestine euthanasia, which has already exists, and the legal one, made of rules, responsibility and knowledge. The objective is that no one else goes through unbearable suffering against their will”, said the national secretary of the association Luca Coscioni, Filomena Gallo, and its treasurer, Marco Cappato, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE.

The association has been fighting for years for a law to regulate euthanasia and today Gallo and Cappato have handed over 1.2 million signatures to this end. Supreme Court, more than double the minimum goal of 500,000 signatures. More than 800,000 signatures were collected by 13,000 volunteers in 1,000 municipalities and the remaining 400,000 were obtained online.

A popular consultation on the partial repeal of article 579 is intended. of the Penal Code, which determines that “whoever causes the death of a man, with his consent, will be punished with imprisonment from six to 15 years”, to decriminalize the possibility of inducing consented death, through the administration of drugs or by interrupting the treatment needed to keep the patient alive.

15 years ago, in September 2006, Piergiorgio Welby, seriously ill due to muscular dystrophy, asked for the first time to the then Italian President , Giorgio Napolitano, the regularization of euthanasia.

In Italy there is a legal vacuum in relation to the issue, although in 2017 the living will law was approved, which allows indicating the treatments you wish to follow or refuse in case of incapacity. In 2018, the Constitutional Court urged parliament to legislate on euthanasia.

If justice admits the petition and the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarela, agrees, the Italians may be summoned to speak between April 15 and June 15, 2022, according to the association.