The TC establishes in its sentence on euthanasia that the right to life is not "disconnected" from the personal "will"

It also clarifies that the State does not have "an unconditional duty of protection" of this right

MADRID, 30 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Constitutional Court (TC) has endorsed the Organic Law for the Regulation of Euthanasia (LORE), in a ruling known this Thursday but advanced on March 22, rejecting Vox's appeal, considering that the Magna Carta does not conceive the right to life as one of an absolute nature that implies a kind of "duty to live", but that cannot be "disconnected" from the "will" of its own holder.

The sentence, of 134 pages and whose draft was supported by the majority of the TC, begins by clarifying that "it is not up to this court to evaluate the convenience, quality or perfectibility of a certain legislative option, or its relationship with other possible alternatives, but simply analyze, when so requested, its 'constitutional framework'".

Established the foregoing, it also establishes that "the 'right to provide assistance in dying' configured by the legislator for people who demand it in euthanasia contexts must be considered taking into account the cultural, moral and legal evolution that has occurred in the decades in our society and in those around us".

Faced with Vox's allegation that "the fundamental right to life enjoys an absolute nature" and the State has the duty to protect it "even against the will of its holder", the TC responds that it is actually a "right to protection of the physical existence of people, which entails for the public power negative duties, or of abstention, and positive duties, of protection against attacks by third parties" and even their own "in certain hypotheses".

Thus, it affirms that the public powers do not have "an unconditional duty of protection that implies a paradoxical duty to live and, to such an extent, prevents the constitutional recognition of autonomous decisions about one's own death in situations of suffering due to an incurable illness or condition medically verifiable and that the person experiences as unacceptable".

Otherwise, he emphasizes, "a kind of constitutional obligation to stay alive would have to weigh on the person or, in other words, that the duties of protection that derive from the proclamation of the law would have to prevail in any case over the will of those who decide to put an end to their own life".

"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," he clarifies.

In addition, the court recalls that in previous rulings, specifically the one referring to palliative care, it already declared that there is "a certain availability of life linked to the autonomy of the person."

The Constitutional notes that "this same power of self-determination regarding the configuration of one's own existence derives from the dignity of the person and the free development of personality, clauses that are the basis of our system of fundamental rights."

On this point, he emphasizes that "the faculty of conscious and responsible self-determination of one's own life crystallizes mainly in the fundamental right to physical and moral integrity", which "protects the essence of the person as a subject with the capacity for free and voluntary, being violated when the individual is mediated or instrumentalized, forgetting that every person is an end in himself".

And it is that, emphasizes the court of guarantees, "the right to life must be read in connection with these other constitutional precepts and, with this, be interpreted as a channel for the exercise of individual autonomy without more restrictions than those justified by the protection of other legitimate rights and interests".

The court states that this connection with other rights makes it possible to "avoid transforming a right of protection against the conduct of third parties (...) into an invasion of the space of freedom and autonomy of the subject."

The Constitutional also responds to the criticisms made by Vox for the way of processing the law as a proposition, instead of a project, which allowed mandatory reports to be avoided; and "in an accelerated manner and during the validity of a state of alarm", which would have deprived "the citizens and parliamentarians of an essential debate on legislation that totally and radically alters the very conception of human life".

The court clarifies that "what the lawsuit calls, in language alien to the Constitution, 'functional identity' between the Government and the majority in the Chambers is the expression of a political, not a legal, appreciation that is in no way consistent with the very rationality of the parlamentary democracy". "Nor does it authorize, for the same reason, to classify as legal fraud the use of a bill, not an Executive project," he adds.

Likewise, it sees the "complaints" regarding the "accelerated" processing of the LORE during the validity of a state of alarm as "inconsistent", responding that it cannot see how said state caused "an effective impairment of the rights of parliamentarians" , for which reason he dismisses this complaint as "absolutely indeterminate", in addition to lacking "legal-constitutional relief".