The trial of twelve assisted suicide activists, on trial for helping people obtain barbiturates to end their lives, opened Monday in Paris.
Aged between 74 and 89, these members of the discreet Ultime Liberté association are being prosecuted for having, between August 2018 and November 2020, helped dozens of people to buy pentobarbital online, a barbiturate that causes rapid and painless death.
Before a packed room of elderly people who had come to support him, the hearing opened early in the afternoon with the calling of the defendants, several of whom stepped forward to the bar with frail steps and stooped figures.
The first day of this trial, scheduled to last until October 9, is devoted to a priority question of constitutionality (QPC). The defense argues that the prosecution of the defendants violates fundamental rights, such as the principle of safeguarding human dignity and the right to die with dignity.
Ahead of the hearing, some 70 members of the association demonstrated outside the Paris courthouse, wearing yellow vests and holding placards demanding "control of one's life until the end," an AFP journalist noted. In one corner, an impromptu activist choir sang Dalida's "Mourir sur scène."
"We are quite satisfied that there is a trial so that we can bring (the issue) to public attention, and perhaps also that public opinion will come out in favor of changing the law," Monique Denis, 69, the wife of one of the defendants and a member of the association's Nancy branch, told AFP.
Franck, 61, joined the association only a few months ago. A family member contacted them to help him end his life.
"I'm here to see if I can help in any way, so that when I'm 80 and sick, I won't have to do it behind closed doors," explains this member, who did not want to give his last name.
– Report from the United States –
This unusual case began in the summer of 2019 with a tip-off from U.S. authorities about a Mexican barbiturate sales network. Packed in liquid form into brown bottles with blue caps, pentobarbital was shipped around the world with the innocuous label "Natural Cosmetics."
Following a wave of searches in France in October 2019, the judicial investigation then revealed a semi-clandestine side of the Ultime Liberté association, some of whose members "accompany" people wishing to die.
Illegally, activists provide information on how to obtain pentobarbital online via encrypted messaging, and even assist them in the process. A level of commitment that each "support person" freely chooses, but which is a matter of debate within the association's own ranks.
The highly divisive fight of Ultime Liberté goes beyond the demand of traditional pro-euthanasia associations for a "right to assisted dying" for patients at the end of their lives and in great suffering, a burning bioethical issue that was the subject of a new bill passed on first reading in the National Assembly in May.
Conceiving itself as the continuation of the militant movements of the 1960s and 1970s (contraception, abortion) on the freedom to dispose of one's body, Ultime Liberté pushes this logic to its paroxysm and demands the right to a "serene" suicide, whether or not one is ill, to the extent that the person who makes this choice is in full possession of their faculties and that their decision is considered.
"Suicide has been decriminalized since the Revolution, but there are many laws that prevent the freedom to commit suicide, non-violent suicide," Claude Hury, president of Ultime Liberté and a key defendant in the trial, told AFP.
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