Italy battles over euthanasia case

7 Feb 2009, 1:44 pm   -   Source: AAP
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Italy was locked in a constitutional battle as President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign into law an emergency decree to stop the mercy killing of a woman.

Italy was locked in a constitutional battle on Friday as President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign into law an emergency decree to stop the mercy killing of a woman who has been comatose for 17 years.

In a case reminiscent of the American Terry Schiavo's, conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi mounted a high-profile effort to block a court ruling allowing doctors to remove Eluana Englaro from life support.

Schiavo, who was in a vegetative state for 15 years, was allowed to die in 2005 after a long court battle during which then-president George W Bush flew to Washington from a vacation at his Texan ranch to try to overturn a court ruling under which she would be allowed to die.

Berlusconi's cabinet, which met twice on Friday, sent a bill to the Senate that would prevent doctors from allowing Englaro to die, and the prime minister vowed that it would be passed within three days.

"I believe I represent the sentiment of the majority of Italians," Berlusconi said.

He added: "If we did not do everything possible to avoid the death of a person whose life is in danger, who is breathing on her own, I would feel guilty of neglecting to help someone in danger."

Doctors in northern Udine, Italy, said on Friday they had begun reducing Englaro's artificial feeding at the start of the process of halting her life support.

Euthanasia is illegal in predominantly Catholic Italy, but patients have the right to refuse care.

In Englaro's case, her father won a court battle on September 13 for her right to die, but struggled to find the Udine hospital that would oversee the process.

Now 38, Englaro has been in a coma since January 1992 following a traffic accident.

Englaro, who had previously lain in a Church-run hospital in nearby Lecco, has become a symbol for the Roman Catholic Church in its campaign against mercy killings.

Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday rejected euthanasia as a "false" answer to suffering, saying those in pain should instead be helped to confront it.

Two days later Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the Vatican's health minister, said in an interview published by the Italian daily La Repubblica, "Stop this murder!" in reference to Englaro's looming death.

After Napolitano's office declared that the decree approved unanimously by Berlusconi's cabinet was unconstitutional, Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, head of the pontifical council for peace and justice, said he was "deeply disappointed" by the president's stance.

The decree states that "pending complete legislation on euthanasia, food and water when it comes to means of sustaining life or providing for the physiological goal of easing suffering" cannot be suspended for people unable to take their own decisions.

Englaro arrived on Tuesday at the Udine hospital, where doctors said her feeding tubes would be removed in three days so that she could die peacefully.

Left-wing opposition leader Walter Veltroni accused Berlusconi of politicising the case. "In this controversy the merit of the case doesn't count for much. I think (Berlusconi) deliberately wants to create an institutional incident."

Similarly, the head of the small Italy of Values party, Antonio Di Pietro, criticised those who he said wanted to resolve the case "only to ingratiate the Church hierarchy."

In its second meeting on Friday the cabinet approved a draft bill that mirrored that of the decree rejected by the left-wing Napolitano, a former communist.

The constitution states that emergency decrees can become law if they are adopted within 60 days by parliament, but any decree passed by the legislature has to win the president's approval.

Gianfranco Fini, the right-wing speaker of the lower house Chamber of Deputies, expressed "serious concern that the cabinet had not taken the arguments of the head of state into account."

In 2006, the Italian Catholic Church refused to allow a religious funeral for poet and writer Piergiorgio Welby, a muscular dystrophy sufferer.

Welby died in December 2006 after being taken off an artificial respirator.

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