Italian activist again circumvents law for better euthanasia ruling

The 69-year-old Elena, a woman from Venice, had requested the help of Cappato after she did not qualify for assisted suicide in Italy. Because she is not dependent on life-sustaining treatment devices, she could not apply for assisted suicide. She, therefore, asked Cappato for help.

Cappato, a former Member of the European Parliament, has experience in these matters. In 2017, Cappato accompanied the 39-year-old dj Fabiano Antoniani to Switzerland. Antoniani had become blind and was nearly fully paralysed after a car accident. After Antoniani’s death, Cappato reported himself to the Italian authorities. He was then charged with ‘incitement to suicide’ and ‘assisted suicide’ and faced a 12-year sentence. Even Pope Francis spoke out on the matter then: “Euthanasia is a rejection of hope, a temptation that must be resisted.” However, somewhat unexpectedly, the Italian Court of Appeal ruled that euthanasia is permissible under certain circumstances. Cappato was thus cleared of all charges in 2019, and Italy became the first southern-European country that permitted euthanasia under certain circumstances.

Those circumstances applied not to 69-year-old Elena, who had irreversible lung cancer, as the Christian Italian daily Avvenire reports. With her family, who “understands and respects her will,” Elena, who had a few months to live, contacted Cappato to ask for support. In a farewell video, Elena said that she regretted that she could not die “in my bed, in my house, holding my daughter’s hand and my husband’s hand”, but that she also “could not wait for things to get worse”. She died on Tuesday.

Cappato risks once again a 12-year jail sentence for his deeds. According to Marina Casini, president of the pro-life organisation Movimento per la Vita, the “radical” Cappato tries to “force the system by directing the spotlight on himself”. Cappato did this earlier as well, in a move described as a strategic one “that seeks to challenge Italy’s penal code which prohibits euthanasia, or physician-assisted suicide”.

Longstanding

The debate in Italy on assisted suicide is longstanding. Catholic circles and right-wing politicians close to them vehemently reject liberalisation. Life must be preserved at all costs, they argue. There is no right to die. Meanwhile, civil rights organisations and left-wing parties complain that Italians have to “go into exile” to be able to die with dignity. Earlier this year, Italy’s constitutional court blocked a right-to-die referendum. Although campaigners had collected some 1.2 million signatures for the referendum — well past the 500,000 threshold needed to hold a popular vote amending existing laws, the court ruled Tuesday that the referendum was “inadmissible” arguing that repealing punishments would not ensure “the minimum constitutionally necessary protection of human life, in general, and with particular reference to the weak and vulnerable.”