The Constitutional Court, in the continuing inertia of the legislator, has once again ruled on the matter of assisted suicide with sentence no. 135 of 2024 (for a comment, A. Ruggeri, 2024 ; P. Veronesi, 2024 ), thus returning to what had already been established with ordinance no. 207 of 2018 , first, and with sentence no. 242 of 2019 , then, (among the many comments, see N. Fiano, 2018 ; U. Adamo, 2018 ; A. Apostoli, 2021 ). In these rulings, as is known, in light of the need to protect not only the identity of the person and his dignity, but also the collective and social interests in preserving the existence of the individual who is in conditions amazon database of fragility and vulnerability, the constitutional judges do not open the way to the recognition, in our legal system, of a real right to die; at the same time, however, they affirm that the absolute prohibition of assisted suicide, in certain concrete situations, ends up unreasonably limiting the patient's freedom of self-determination in the choice of therapies, including life-saving ones, aimed at freeing him from suffering, imposing, in the final analysis, a single way to say goodbye to life. In other words, they take note of the existence of difficult cases, connected to completely peculiar facts to which spaces of non-punishability must be connected, as they refer to those same situations already provided for by law 219 of 2017, which allows the revocation of consent to any therapeutic treatment, including artificial respiration, hydration and nutrition, allowing the pathology to take its course ( D. Pulitanò, 2018 ). In light of this, they identify four conditions, the verification of which is entrusted to the structures of the National Health Service, the verification of which allows access to assisted suicide: (a) the irreversibility of the pathology , (b) the presence of physical or psychological suffering, which the patient considers intolerable , (c) the patient's ability to make free and informed decisions , (d) the patient's dependence on life-sustaining treatments (Constitutional Court, order no. 207 of 2018 and sentence no. 242 of 2019 ).
It is precisely the requirement of dependence on life-sustaining treatments.not to exist, according to the Judge for Preliminary Investigations of Florence, in the case of Massimiliano Scalas, suffering from advanced multiple sclerosis, in a state of almost total immobility, who is accompanied to Switzerland by Marco Cappato, Chiara Lalli and Felicetta Maltese; all, as a consequence of this, investigated for the crime under art. 580 of the Criminal Code before the Court of Florence. It is the same GIP of Florence, on 17 January 2024 ( A. D'Aloia, 2024 ), to raise a question of the constitutional legitimacy of art. 580 of the Criminal Code, «as amended by sentence no. 242 of 2019», in the part in which it subordinates the non-punishability of those who facilitate the suicide of others to the condition that the help is provided to a person «kept alive by life-sustaining treatments», since, in reference to the arts. 2, 3, 13, 32 and 117 of the Constitution, the latter in relation to Articles 8 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (respectively, the right to respect for private and family life and the prohibition of discrimination), this would determine an unreasonable "disparity of treatment between patients and a consequent unjustified violation of the patient's freedom of self-determination in the choice of therapies, including those aimed at freeing him from suffering".