A five-year-old law banning professionally assisted suicide has been rejected as unconstitutional by Germany's top court. According to a BBC News report, the Constitutional Court backed complaints by a group of terminally ill patients and doctors who challenged the law that made “commercial promotion of assisted suicide” a criminal offence. Assisted dying had been legal.
But a law change in 2015 prompted terminally ill people to go to Switzerland and the Netherlands to end their lives. Advice centres that operated until then had to stop working because of the risk of a jail sentence for promoting suicide. The law was aimed at stopping groups or individuals creating a form of business, by helping people to die in return for money.
In practice it meant a ban on providing any type of “recurring” assistance. Medical ethics expert Gita Neumann, who has provided advice and support for years to people in their eighties, said she knew of no doctor in Germany who had helped with assisted suicide in the past five years, because of the new clause in the criminal code.
The head of Germany's palliative medicine society, Heiner Melching, has warned though that overturning the ban could open a door to “self-styled euthanasia assistants”. There is no legal entitlement to euthanasia in Germany and doctors cannot be made to provide assisted suicide against their will. Euthanasia in Germany remains punishable by up to five years in jail.
[link url="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51643306"]Full BBC News report[/link]