Italy: Eluana Englaro's life and death cause chaos

Eluana Englaro crashed her car on January 18th 1992. The accident left her in a 17-year coma. Her life – or more accurately her death – has become the field of a vicious political crisis.

Her Father, Beppino Englaro, has been campaigning since 1997 for the right to stop providing the nutrients that keep her alive. His arguments are persuasive. Principal among them is that Eluana had herself witnessed a friend being left in a coma, from which he later died. Over many conversations she had told family and friends that should it happen to her she would prefer to die.

Euthanasia is illegal in Italy, as in a lot of Europe, but in November 2008 Italy’s Supreme Court granted Doctors the right to remove life support.

Silvio Berlusconi’s actions ignited the controversy when he tried to pass a last minute ministerial decree preventing Doctors from ending Eluana’s life support. In doing so he contravened not only the wishes of her family but also the final ruling of Italian law. Beppino Englaro called Berlusconi’s intervention “an inconceivable violence” (Source: Observer, 8th February).

The Italian President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign the decree on the grounds that it was unconstitutional for a politician to ignore the judiciary. Eluana died on the 9th February.

The situation has caused chaos in Italian politics, as shown by this video. Berlusconi has been quoted as saying: “Napolitano made a serious mistake [in overturning the decree]” and “she did not die, she was killed”.

These are the facts, and even a cursory analysis can highlight some disturbing implications.

First, a number of papers point out the centrality to events of what the Slovenian paper Dnevnik calls “the state within a state” – the Catholic Church (10th February).

Throughout the Vatican has had a clear, hard line on the case. Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, spokesman for health issues, said removing the feeding tubes was “monstrous and inhuman murder” and the Vatican newspaper accused the Court of Cassation of “necrophilia” (Observer, 8th February). Apparently Berlusconi only attempted his ministerial decree following a phone call from Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a senior Vatican cleric.

While it is not news that the Italian population is strongly religious, since 1929 the Vatican has been a separate country, with as few rights to the governance of Italy as, say, France would. This is why the impact the church’s position had on events is so concerning, because it signifies a dissolving of the constraints on the church altering the course of public affairs.

The Spanish daily El Pais said: “[Berlusoni’s] political ambition…tallies with the wishes of the Vatican”. German daily Die Tageszeitung put it forcefully, saying: “Berlusconi has always demonstrated that in his view laws are there for one thing only: to be 'adapted'. Now he is furthering this goal more or less in the service of the Catholic Church. The church can be happy to have such a willing advocate in Italy's government, one who does not hesitate to declare the Vatican's 'natural law' - the opposition to any form of assisted suicide - the sole standard”.

Second, Napolitano’s refusal to sign the decree points to an emerging constitutional crisis. It is almost as rare for the Italian head of state to directly intervene in politics as it would be for the Queen, and equally as unsettling to the balance of constitutional power.

Two key criticisms basically emerge: the encroachment of religious morality onto a theoretically secular state, and the ease with which Berlusconi invokes this morality to alter and bypass state institutions.

Last word goes to the editor of Italian daily La Repubblica, who wrote: “it is disturbing to have to discover the true soul of the Right, cruel and savage in its craving for absolute power, ignoring all sense of state, disrespectful of [political] institutions… With the instrumentalisation of a national and family tragedy, with the dark echo of those who would turn death into politics, the most dangerous phase for the fate of the republic in Italy's recent history began yesterday” (10th February).

Press review source: Café Babel (see links on right)
Other sources: Guardian Unlimited and Times Online