More Rights for the Dying

German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said giving legal weight to living wills would lead to "more legal clarity for patients, families and doctors."

The minister made her comments to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, at the beginning of the 66th annual meeting of the Association of German Law Professionals in Stuttgart.

Zypries wants to codify living wills, in which patients determine their own guidelines on resuscitation and the right to die, in civil law. This will give doctors clearer guidelines for treatment, she said.

Legal repercussions

Should living wills be granted legal status, "if a patient is clearly opposed to a certain treatment measure, then the doctor will have to refrain from doing it." Otherwise the physician could be indicted for assault and battery, Zypris told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper.

However, Zypries said demands to make people who passively assist suicide exempt from legal penalties were unnecessary.

Hospice group in favor

The German Hospice Association welcomed Zypries' position.

"An explicit standardization of allowed forms of assisted-suicide has no place in criminal law," association head Eugen Brysch told reporters.

To do so could be mistakenly seen as a step toward the "increasing acceptance of actively assisted suicide," he added.

He agreed it made sense to make living wills an aspect of German statute law, which are already recognized in case law.

"The parliament has a clear duty to give living wills a legal basis, by passing it into law," Brysch said, adding that Germany needs to finally allow its citizens self-determination, and allow them to right to protect their integrity through a living will.

On Wednesday at the Stuttgart meeting, Bonn-based criminal lawyer Torsten Verrel plans to clarify his demands to expressly decriminalize passive assisted-suicide and the shutting down of life-support systems. Without this, doctors' fears of lawsuits lead to "extensive exculpatory medicine," and an "inadequate reduction in suffering," he told the AFP news agency.