French Council protects conscience rights for Catholics, pharmacists as euthanasia law takes effect

The official promulgation of France’s end-of-life law in the Journal Officiel on Aug. 19 came with a significant victory for religious and conscience freedom.

Catholic hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes will not be forced to allow euthanasia or assisted suicide on their premises, and pharmacists cannot be compelled to prepare or dispense the lethal substance.

This conscience-clause win, secured by interpretive reservations by the Constitutional Council on Aug. 14, has received less attention than the law itself, adopted by the Parliament in July, and which the progressive government of President Emmanuel Macron had vigorously defended since 2023.

In a press release on its ruling, the council — France’s highest constitutional authority — specified that the exemption applies when hosting assisted dying would be “manifestly contrary” to an institution’s statutory mission or project, and only if that opposition is formally written into its governing statutes or an ethical charter, and only if other establishments are able to meet local needs.

For pharmacists, the council issued a separate reservation grounded in Article 10 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, ruling that preparing or dispensing the lethal substance “is liable to offend” personal convictions.

As originally adopted, the text required that when a person is hospitalized or living in certain covered facilities, “the head of the establishment must allow the intervention of the professionals participating in the procedure” as well as access for anyone accompanying the person requesting to die — with no exception for an institution’s own objections.

Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris welcomed the reservations in his Aug. 19 message to the faithful marking the law’s promulgation, calling them “an opportunity.” He expressed his hope that institutions built around care for the gravely ill and expertise in palliative care would “find in these reservations an encouragement to maintain their particular character, and to remain places where no one will be killed.”

The Aug. 14 exemption followed formal submissions to the council from several Catholic and pro-life organizations, including the Fondation Jérôme Lejeune and the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), a Strasbourg-based advocacy group, which argued that forcing institutions to accommodate mobile euthanasia teams “constitutes a clear violation of their freedom.”

While the bill was still moving through the French Parliament, Sister Agnès, a physician with the Little Sisters of the Poor, on March 3 spoke on behalf of French Catholic congregations that run hospitals and nursing homes during an interactive dialogue with the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief in Geneva. She told the rapporteur the draft law would force those congregations to accept euthanasia on their premises or risk up to two years in prison and a 30,000-euro fine, warning they could be forced to “renege on Godʼs commandments” to keep operating.

Legal scholars have noted the unusual character of this reversal and highlighted the weight of the advocacy of Catholic organizations.

Roseline Letteron, a professor of public law who publishes the blog “Libertés, Libertés chéries,” wrote that the council built the institutions’ exemption on different legal ground than the pharmacists’ clause: not the individual right to conscience but the right to form an association and the right to run a business as one sees fit, combined with an older idea, borrowed from a 1959 law on religious schools, that an institution can have a distinct “character” worth protecting.

French courts had rejected comparable institutional opt-outs before, for civil-status registrars who refused to perform same-sex marriages in 2013 and hospital department heads who objected to abortion in 2001. Letteron asked directly whether the council “wanted to give symbolic satisfaction to the Catholic lobby,” concluding that “the answer is yes.”

Meanwhile, ECLJ Director Grégor Puppinck called the Aug. 14 decision “a great victory,” saying in a statement that the group would now “continue this fight in other countries that have already legalized euthanasia, in order to guarantee the freedom of faith-based institutions there as well.”

A French constitutional ruling does not bind courts abroad, but the ECLJ — which has published its own comparative-law study of the question — intends to press the same argument through European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on institutional autonomy, contending that freedom of religion protects “communities and institutions,” not only individuals, and that “the right to refuse to kill must be accepted completely” for both.

The Fondation Jérôme Lejeune, whose own submission had focused especially on the law’s lack of protection for people with intellectual disabilities — a concern it says it had also raised repeatedly with the U.N. — called the council’s ruling “scandalously minimal” in an Aug. 14 statement.

“The Fondation Jérôme Lejeune will never resign itself,” said its president, Jean-Marie Le Méné. “The fight is far from over.”

The foundation said it would watch closely as the government drafts implementing decrees, continuing to press its demand for protections for people with intellectual disabilities.

Source: https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/europe/french-council-protects-conscience-rights-for-catholics-pharmacists-as-euthanasia-law-takes