PAN expects lawmaking process to resume ‘quickly’

The PAN spokesman hopes that the legislative process to decriminalize violent death will resume “quickly” and that MPs will only deal with issues raised by the Constitutional Court.

“It seems to us that now the process should be launched quickly in order to somehow resolve what may be troubling the Constitutional Court. [TC] and we hope that the process will adhere to this exclusively and exclusively in the aspects indicated here by TC,” said Ines de Souza Real.

The leader of the People-Animals-Nature party spoke to reporters after the TC declared unconstitutional some of the provisions of the decree regulating euthanasia, in response to a request from the President of the Republic for a preventive check.

Following this decision, the President of the Republic vetoed this parliamentary decree as unconstitutional, as required by the Constitution. The diploma will now be returned to the Assembly of the Republic.

“We hope that the President of the Republic, after this process goes through the Assembly of the Republic again, will not use a political veto and will allow this law to move forward, because it represents the most elementary justice towards people who, in the great suffering caused by an incurable disease, as well as irreversible suffering,” Ines de Souza Real said.

The sole deputy of the PAN defended that “the concepts that were provided for in this diploma are cumulative, that is, the criterion of suffering and irreversible disease is cumulative”, believing that you are entering “games with words and concepts.”

Inés de Souza Real lamented that “the court did not understand this, again referring to the concept of a fatal disease and the need for greater definition of concepts.

The PAN leader also dismissed the idea of ​​a referendum, noting that “the process was one of the most active processes in several legislatures”, with “listening to various specialists” and “civil society itself”.

“We do not think that the issue of such high delicacy will be legalized or decided in a referendum,” he defended.

The Constitutional Court considered that an “unacceptable lack of definition of the precise scope” of the physician-assisted death decree had been created, noting that Parliament had gone “further” by amending the previous diploma “in significant respects”.

It was the third decree approved by Parliament to decriminalize death in healthcare in a period of about two years.

The first one was also declared unconstitutional by the Labor Code in March 2021 at the request of the President of the Republic for a preventive check due to insufficient regulatory compaction.

In November of the same year, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa exercised a political veto against the second parliamentary decree on this subject, as it contained contradictory language.