PARIS (Reuters) – A bill on end of life will be debated before the summer by Parliament, French President Emmanuel Macron announced in an interview published on Sunday by Libération and La Croix.
“The text must be transmitted to the Council of State within eight or ten days. It will arrive on the table of the Council of Ministers in April, for a first reading in May. On a text which raises such issues, we cannot don’t ask for urgency, there will be no accelerated procedure,” Emmanuel Macron told journalists from the two dailies.
“We thought of this law as (…) a law which reconciles the autonomy of the individual and the solidarity of the nation. (…) It does not create, strictly speaking, a new right nor a freedom, but it traces a path which did not exist until then and which opens the possibility of requesting assistance in dying under certain strict conditions,” said Emmanuel Macron before setting out these conditions.
“This support will be reserved for adults, (…). Second condition: people must be capable of full and complete discernment, which means that patients with psychiatric illnesses are excluded from this assistance in dying. or neurodegenerative diseases that impair discernment, such as Alzheimer’s.”
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Emmanuel Macron explains that the drafters of the bill on the end of life relied on the opinion of the National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE) and on the work of the citizens’ convention which ruled last April.
“The term we have chosen is that of assisted dying because it is simple and humane and it clearly defines what it is about. The term euthanasia refers to the act of ending someone’s life. ‘one, with or even without his consent, which is obviously not the case here.’
(Written by Nicolas Delame, with contributions from Elizabeth Pineau)
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