Slovenian referendum stalls assisted suicide Bill

Slovenians have rejected plans to progress proposed assisted suicide legislation.

In a referendum triggered by a national petition, the majority of voters (53 per cent) opposed implementing the Assisted Voluntary End of Life Act adopted by the National Assembly in July, delaying it for at least a year.

The result overturned a 2024 referendum, when 55 per cent of Slovenians favoured allowing terminally ill patients to get help to kill themselves.

‘False choice’

Writing in The Critic, Director of Advocacy for ADF International Robert Clarke observed: “What is clear is that support for the move dropped as the precise details of the bill became clearer.”

The barrister commented: “Here is a nation presented with a detailed law, with the chance for debate, here is a legislature that insisted it had built in ‘safeguards’, and here are voters — many of whom had previously expressed support for some form of assisted dying — taking a closer look and concluding that something was wrong.”

Voters, he concluded, “refused the false choice between suffering and state-sanctioned death. In doing so, they reminded the rest of Europe of a truth we are in danger of forgetting: that the compassionate response to suffering is not to eliminate the sufferer, but to address the suffering.

“If Westminster is willing to listen, the people of Slovenia have delivered a message worth hearing.”

Westminster

Last week, during the House of Lords’ fourth day of scrutinising amendments to Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson highlighted the vulnerability of pregnant women, prisoners and the homeless.

Thus far, Peers have debated around 100 amendments, still leaving over a thousand to be considered across the ten days scheduled for the new year.

Despite activists’ accusations that the unprecedented number of amendments is a delaying tactic, the Bill’s critics insist that debating amendments is necessary due to the lack of “due diligence and proper pre-legislative scrutiny”.