Euthanasia, the Constitutional Court's ruling on the Libera case

1. Poor legal expertise, intellectual dishonesty, political malice, bias: the reader may choose which of these reasons best explains the erroneous manner in which the media, for the most part, have reported ruling no. 132/2025 on the "end of life," heralded as a "no" to euthanasia. This is not the case. Simply read it or, for the lazy ones, at least skim the accompanying press release. It is, in fact, a decision of inadmissibility, not a ruling of rejection. Confusing the two will result in a first-year law student failing the constitutional law exam. Inadmissibility is a question that the Constitutional Court cannot address on the merits, for procedural reasons. Only if admissible, in fact, does the Constitutional Court address the doubts of legitimacy raised by the judge, upholding or rejecting the question. In the case of ruling no. 132/2025, the first thing happened, not the second. At present, the question of the legitimacy of Article 579 of the Criminal Code, which punishes the killing of a consenting person without exception, remains entirely unresolved. Nor is the Court of Florence precluded from re-submitting the matter to the Constitutional Court, supplementing its previous appeal.

2. Sentence no. 132/2025, in fact, found a lack of reasoning on a factual element, essential to the reasoning of the Florentine judge: the alleged unavailability of a mechanical aid that would allow the patient, deprived of the use of her limbs, to self-administer the lethal drug. In the absence of such a device, the only way to end her unbearable ordeal would be the assistance that the attending physician is willing to provide. By assisting her, however, she would be committing a crime punishable by six to fifteen years' imprisonment ( art. 579 of the Criminal Code ). Hence, the request for a declaration of unconstitutionality that extends to such cases what the Constitutional Court has already recognized in cases of assisted suicide ( art. 580 of the Criminal Code ): the non-punishability of anyone who materially carries out the wishes of a patient who is in the same conditions as those for medically assisted suicide, identified in the well-known sentence no. 242/2019 pronounced in the “ DJ Fabo-Cappato case”.

For its part, the Court deemed the market research conducted – at the request of the Florence Court – by the regional health authority to be insufficient. It demands that the investigation involve " specialized bodies operating, with the necessary degree of authority, at the central level, such as, at the very least, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the technical-scientific body of the National Health Service." Once the documents are returned to the Florence Court, it will be up to the Court to restart the research, appointing the appropriate authorities. The fate of Article 579 of the Criminal Code and, above all, the fate of Libera (the pseudonym that MS, the patient appellant, chose for herself) will depend on its outcome. If the device is available, Libera will have the right to use it. If it is unavailable, however, the question under Article 579 will have to be reconsidered before the Supreme Court. 579 of the Criminal Code, which, by precluding Libera's right to self-determination, transforms her right to life into the duty to live it, until the end, in conditions contrary to her dignity and her will.

3. The interim solution adopted by the Constitutional Court appears to be a tragically disembodied response, failing to fully address Libera's life expectancy and the "timeframes reasonably related to her state of suffering," of which the Constitutional Court judges are also aware. Libera is suffering from primary progressive multiple sclerosis . The progression of her disease, incompatible with the normal timeframes of jurisdiction, justified the urgent procedure (Article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure), which gave rise to the constitutional issue. With the Constitutional Court's interim decision, however, the urgent protection requested is postponed, which concretely risks nullifying it. Indeed, there is a serious risk that the pace of her degenerative disease will exceed the timeframe required to find the requested device on the market, to which will be added the timeframe for its possible importation or production, and the timeframe for the subsequent conformity assessments.

It may also happen that the atrocious progression of the disease causes Libera to lose the residual use of the facial or mouth muscles needed to activate the ad hoc device, rendering the additional investigation requested by the Constitutional Court unnecessary. You don't need to have read The Augustinian Confessions to know that "time " is an existential state, rather than an objective fact. The final decisions about when to say goodbye to life (with all its corollaries of pain and unhappiness) are measured by a stopwatch that institutions stubbornly refuse to use. We saw confirmation of this a few days ago: the Senate responded to Laura Santi 's very humane posthumous appeal for the passage of a law on " end of life " by once again postponing its debate. Libera, in her discussions with the Constitutional Court, received a similar response.

4. Legally, was this a mandatory response? It is certain that the lack of an admissibility requirement prevents the Constitutional Court from ruling on the legitimacy of the contested provision. However, in this preliminary assessment, it has repeatedly remedied a limping question, in order to address it on its merits. This is even more true when it concerns significant provisions that, procedurally, are not easily accessible to the Palazzo della Consulta. Both of the latter two characteristics are undoubtedly present in the issue at issue in judgment no. 132/2025. Euthanasia is a topic on which all surveys confirm the gap between legal provisions and social conscience. With the option of an abrogative referendum, rejected by the Consulta ( judgment no. 50/2022 ), Article Article 579 of the Criminal Code has now been able to reach constitutional review through a route (the action to ascertain a fundamental right, its legal name ) that until now had been difficult to navigate and only in electoral matters (judgments nos. 1/2014 and 35/2017). Nor did the judges lack an alternative to the procedural decision they made: let's see which one.

5. In recent years, thanks to the targeted reform of the supplementary rules for proceedings before the Constitutional Court, its process has been enriched with new participatory tools. Some of these have fueled the procedural debate that culminated in ruling no. 132/2025. The first is the intervention of third parties, unrelated to the main proceedings but with a vested interest in participating in the constitutional proceedings (two parties in this case). The second tool is that of amici curiae (seven in this case), i.e., written briefs filed by social groups or institutional entities representing collective or widespread interests involved in the constitutional question.

The rules also provide for a third instrument (not used in the case under consideration): the Court, "where it deems it necessary to acquire information pertaining to specific disciplines," can summon "experts" to a special chamber. The parties to the proceedings are present at their hearings, and the President can authorize them to ask questions (Article 17). Instead of summoning the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the Court could summon it directly, requesting all relevant information. Alternatively, it could order, through a specific order, " the means of evidence" it deemed appropriate, establishing " the terms and procedures to be observed for their collection" (Article 14). Having thus acquired the necessary information, on their own initiative and within a short timeframe, the constitutional judges would have been able to decide on the merits of the question posed to them—through the Court of Florence—by Libera. Her suffering, her resilience, her legal wisdom deserved more than a provisional response in the procedural procedure.

FROM

Andrea Pugiotto