The Constitutional Council on Wednesday June 17 rejected a proposal for a shared initiative referendum (RIP), emanating from right-wing and far-right parliamentarians, who hoped to push the government back on the right to assisted dying, about to be adopted in mid-July.
“The active provocation of the death of a patient cannot be qualified as treatment, therapy or care”: this was the text submitted by Senator LR Francis Szpiner to the Constitutional Council, claiming nearly 200 parliamentarians in support, to trigger a shared initiative referendum.
They thus hoped to counter the law which intends to establish a procedure governed by the right to assisted dying, accessible to certain patients suffering from a serious and incurable condition, who could receive or administer a lethal substance.
But the Constitutional Council, which must rule on any RIP proposal, rejected it. In a decision that could set a precedent, he notably considered that “ethical questions relating to the end of life” do not fall within the scope of Article 11 of the Constitution, which governs this referendum procedure. It specifies that a referendum can notably relate to “reforms relating to the economic, social or environmental policy of the nation and to the public services which contribute to it”.
The requesting parliamentarians considered that their proposal could fall within the scope of “social policy” and “the public services which contribute to it”. However, the Sages stressed that the preparatory work for the last modification of the scope of the referendum, in 1995, demonstrated that “the constituent intended to exclude social questions” from this field, arguing that the explanatory statement of the reasons for the law illustrated by itself that it was a question of society.
No successful RIP
Another problem raised by the Constitutional Council: the applicants’ text did not constitute a “reform” of existing law, since at the date of the referral no law “authorizes the performance of acts relating to euthanasia, assisted suicide or any other form of active assistance in dying”.
Left-wing parliamentarians had also come up against the same case law when they tried to launch an RIP on the latest pension reform raising the retirement age to 64 years.
Inscribed in the Constitution since 2008, the shared initiative referendum is a complex procedure which has never been successful: the project must successively bring together a fifth of parliamentarians, pass the filter of the Constitutional Council, and obtain the support of 10% of the electorate (nearly five million people), before the French can decide.
