Rights of the Terminally Ill Act

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Four terminally ill people decided to end their lives with the help of this machine. The device automatically administered a fatal injection to them after they answered “yes” to a series of questions on the computer screen. This practice was legal in the Northern Territory of Australia between 1996 and 1997.

The Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (German: Law on the Rights of the incurably sick ) is a controversial law of the Northern Territory of Australia , that the euthanasia legalized, but currently ineffective.

Content and creation

After the Northern Territory Administrator Austin Asche approved the May 25, 1995 Act on June 16, 1995 and its amendments on March 20, 1996, the Act went into effect on July 1, 1996. With an amendment to the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 (self-government law for the Northern Territory) on March 24, 1997 by the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 , the Australian federal legislature withdrew the legislative competence of the Northern Territory for laws concerning euthanasia, thereby declaring the law on the rights of the terminally ill is ineffective. This means that the law is de facto still in force, but cannot be applied because it should not have been passed.

The law allowed terminally ill patients to commit suicide, either through the direct involvement of a doctor or through the doctor's procurement of medication. It required that it was ensured that the patients were both actually terminally ill (which had to be confirmed by two doctors) and capable of giving consent (which had to be confirmed by a psychiatrist). The patient had to be at least 18 years old, had been informed of the consequences and had to submit a written application no earlier than 7 days after expressing his decision. After at least another 48 hours, the doctor was allowed to provide assistance.

Four people committed suicide under its rules while the law was in effect. The first of them (and thus the first in the world to end his life by euthanasia) was the cancer patient Bob Dent (* 1930), who died on September 22, 1996. In addition, two other people had been given permission to kill themselves before the law was invalidated.

German translations of the text of the law can be found in Wolfslast / Conrads (see under literature) - the date of entry into force (December 1997) given there is incorrect, at this point in time the law was already ineffective through the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 - and including in a revised form of the provisions of the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 by Lorenz (see under literature).

Current

In February 2008, the leader of the Australian Greens , Senator Bob Brown , presented a Bill of Rights of the Terminally Ill (Euthanasia Laws Repeal) Bill 2008 in the Australian Commonwealth Parliament , in German: Bill on the rights of the terminally ill (Euthanasia Laws Repeal) , which aims to repeal Commonwealth legislation. The bill is based on the view that the Commonwealth should not intervene arbitrarily, ad hoc, in the work of a democratically elected territorial legislative assembly, as it did under the Euthanasia Laws Act in 1997 at the suggestion of the conservative Kevin Andrews .

Australian government senators support Brown's move to reinstate the territorial parliament's right to decide on euthanasia legislation. However, after two women were found guilty of assisting suicide in an Alzheimer's patient in Sydney in June 2008, experts consider the lifting of the euthanasia ban to be unlikely.

literature

  • Margaret M. Funk: A Tale of Two Statutes: Development of Euthanasia in Australia's Northern Territory an the State of Oregon. Temple International and Comparative Law Journal, Spring 2000, pp. 149 ff.
  • Gabriele Wolfslast; Christoph Conrads: Text collection euthanasia. Berlin 2001, pp. 195–209, ISBN 3-540-67835-2 ( limited preview on Google Book Search )
  • Jörn Lorenz: Euthanasia - A Bill. Baden-Baden, Zurich, St. Gallen 2008, pp. 316–331, ISBN 978-3-8329-3822-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rights of the Terminally Ill (Euthanasia Laws Repeal) Bill 2008 of February 14, 2008
  2. ↑ Senate backs euthanasia law repeal. ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Australian of June 26, 2008 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.theaustralian.news.com.au
  3. ^ Fight for the right to euthanasia. (tagesschau.de archive) Tagesschau from July 4th, 2008