BERLIN, July 4, 2023 – In an open letter, the Humanist Association of Germany (HVD) appeals to the members of the German Bundestag to create a regulation that implements the right to self-determined dying established by the Federal Constitutional Court.
“The previously unregulated environment of assisted suicide now finally needs a reliable framework for action and orientation for all those involved, including legal certainty for doctors who are prepared to provide assisted suicide for their patients,” explains Erwin Kress, spokesperson for the board of the HVD Bundesverband. This legal certainty can be achieved with the draft law, which is considered to be liberal: “We see the draft law ‘for assisted suicide regulations to protect the right to self-determined dying’, which has now been brought together by Katrin Helling-Plahr, Renate Künast, Helge Lindh and others, as the successful result of a very careful struggle for balance,” says the HVD in its open letter.
In the run-up to the planned vote, representatives of medical and psychiatric associations have issued an unacceptable and misleading joint statement. On the one hand, it is claimed that the bill by Helling-Plahr, Künast, Lindh and others, which is considered liberal, does not take suicide prevention into account. However, the parliamentary group has by no means lost sight of the goal of preventing suicides, particularly those caused by mental illness. On the contrary, the nationwide counseling structure provided for in the merged law paves the way for “evidence-based measures”, as called for in their parallel motion for a resolution on suicide prevention, according to the HVD’s open letter to the members of the Bundestag.
On the other hand, there is talk of a hasty rush to introduce a regulation on assisted suicide that has not been fully discussed. “This is inaccurate insofar as an orientation debate already took place in the Bundestag a year ago. At the end of 2022, after the first reading, the Legal Affairs Committee also spent more than five hours discussing the draft legislation available at the time,” says Gita Neumann, Federal Representative of the HVD for Medical Ethics and Autonomy at the End of Life. More than three years after the ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court, the regulation of assisted suicide must now finally be implemented by the legislator.
Other expert voices also take the wind out of the sails of the unfounded arguments in the professional associations’ statement. The renowned professors of palliative medicine Ralf J. Jox and Gian Domenico Borasio appeal: In view of the proven plurality of opinions in the German medical profession, the Bundestag “should not allow such a transparent ideological barrage to prevent it from bringing a legal regulation of assisted suicide to life. After years of intensive debate in parliament and long before that in civil society, the legislation is not rushed, but overdue.”
The German Humanist Association has already addressed the members of the German Bundestag on several occasions: with its draft bill on the new regulation of assisted suicide from spring 2020 and in an orientation paper on assisted suicide legislation. In March 2023, the HVD pleaded for a balanced new legal regulation: “Ensuring autonomy in assisted suicide and suicide prevention together“. Most recently, the HVD expressly welcomed the joint liberal draft bill on the regulation of assisted suicide.
