Slovenians have rejected plans to progress proposed assisted suicide legislation.
In a referendum triggered by a national petition, the majority of voters (53%) in the most north-easterly part of the former Yugosalvia (53 per 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.
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.”