In Italy, over 750,000 people sign initiative for referendum on legalizing euthanasia

More than 750,000 people in Italy have signed a petition calling for the legalisation of euthanasia, organisers said on Wednesday, exceeding by far the half-a-million threshold needed to force a referendum on the issue. A vote could be held as early as next year on the campaign, which calls for changes to the country’s laws on assisted dying. [...] Anyone helping another person to commit suicide can be jailed for between five and 12 years under current Italian law. But the constitutional court added an exception in 2019 for “patients kept alive by treatment… and affected by an incurable disease that causes physical and psychological suffering they find intolerable”. The patient must be “fully capable of taking free and conscious decisions”,the judges added. People suffering from incurable diseases who do not fall into this category have no legal recourse to assisted suicide.
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