German lawmakers fail to agree on assisted suicide regulations

Lawmakers in Germany failed to agree Thursday on new rules regulating assisted suicide, rejecting two cross-party proposals drawn up after the country’s highest court ruled that legislation banning the practice when conducted on a “business” basis was unconstitutional.

The Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 2020 that the ban, which was introduced five years earlier, violated the rights of citizens to determine the circumstances of their own deaths by restricting their ability to seek assistance from a third party.

Active assistance — physically taking a patient’s life for them — is banned in Germany, but passive help, such as providing deadly medication for them to take themselves, has been a legal gray area.

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Cross-party groups of lawmakers put forward two competing proposals for new rules. One option would have allowed for doctors to prescribe lethal medication between three and 12 weeks after an adult underwent obligatory counseling.

The other option took a much more restrictive approach. It would have allowed for assisted suicide when a psychiatrist or psychotherapist could establish during two appointments at least three months apart that a person’s desire to die was of a “voluntary, serious and permanent nature” and that the person didn’t have a mental illness that restricted their ability to make independent decisions.

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The proposal also would have required counseling from another doctor.

Both proposals were defeated by margins of dozens of votes after Thursday’s debate.

The 2015 legislation that was struck down by the constitutional court allowed assisted suicide for “altruistic motives” but prohibited offering it to someone else “on business terms.” The legislation carried a potential penalty of up to three years in jail. The effect was for those involved in providing suicide assistance to widely curtail their work.

The issue is a particularly sensitive topic in a country where more than 200,000 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed under euthanasia programs run by the Nazis.