The Constitutional Court has again endorsed the Euthanasia law approved in 2021 during the Government of Pedro Sánchez following the rejection of the appeal filed by the PP. The guarantees body had already pronounced in March when it did the same with Vox's appeal. The sentence has been approved with two particular votes of the magistrates considered conservative Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel. The text defends that the right to a dignified death is closely related to rights such as those that guarantee physical and moral integrity. In addition, it specifies the conscientious objection part and underlines that this objection can only be accepted by healthcare professionals and not by legal entities, that is, centers or hospitals.
The battle horse of the PP and Vox was to prevent the right to euthanasia from being considered a fundamental right. Despite this, the sentence recalls that the right to die affects constitutional values and principles linked to personal freedom and dignity and "to a fundamental right such as that of physical and moral integrity".
In this case, the report has fallen to the president of the court, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, who rejects all the claims of the party led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo. From a formal point of view, the judgment endorses the form of processing of the rule. The PP argued that the law had been processed incorrectly because it was through an organic law proposal of the majority group that supports the Spanish Government, which meant, according to the opinion of the appellants, a fraud on the law because it intended to evade the issuance of reports by the Council of State, General Council of the Judiciary, Fiscal Council and the Bioethics Committee and, thus, restrict the parliamentary debate.
The ruling considers the complaints relating to the processing to be "inconsistent", as was supported in the March ruling.
The second point that the PP used to try to declare the law unconstitutional was the incompatibility of the rule with the right to life. The judgment focuses on the question of euthanasia in three fundamental examples. The first is that euthanasia or the provision of aid to die is based on certain values, principles and fundamental rights enshrined in the constitutional text.
The second aspect it confirms is that the right to life "does not impose the obligation to stay alive on its holder". And, finally, that the constitutional foundation of euthanasia explains that it cannot be limited to terminally ill cases.
This text assesses in more depth how far conscientious objection can go. Ratifies that the only actions capable of being exempted from the legal duty to guarantee the right to euthanasia are the interventions of health professionals, regardless of their professional category, in the effective execution of the aforementioned provision. According to the court, only in these cases can there be situations of conflict due to "intimate, ideological or moral convictions", which justify the health professional's refusal to carry out an intervention "which constitutes, in general, a legal imperative". collect the sentence.
But beyond these exceptional cases, the Constitutional Court warns that extending conscientious objection to an institutional area, as the PP intends, "would not only lack a constitutional foundation, but would put at risk the effectiveness of the provision itself healthcare".
