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 has repeatedly called on parliament to define how it should be regulated.
However MPs have avoided the deeply divisive issue and there remains no legal framework at a national level to regulate assisted suicide.
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).
The Sardinian law was approved with 32 votes in favour, 19 against and one abstention.
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.
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.
In 2019 Italy’s constitutional court ruled that it is not always a crime to help someone in “intolerable suffering” 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.
However in 2022 the constitutional court rejected a petition calling for a referendum to decriminalise euthanasia, after right-to-die activists had secured more than 1.2 million signatures in a petition.
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.
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.
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.
