With the publisher's authorization, the English translation of the book “Wounds of the Soul and Imprisoned Bodies. Suicide and aid to suicide from the perspective of a liberal and solidarity-based law”, by Stefano Canestrari, Bonomia University Press, 2021, is now available on our website.

Click here to download the book.

Abstract

The book analyzes the issue of medical assistance to die in the perspective of a liberal and solidarity law. The book takes as its starting point an Italian suicide aid case, in which the defendant had accompanied a man to die in a Swiss clinic. The man had been left quadriplegic and blind after a car accident. In the course of the trial, the man's defence had appealed to the Italian Constitutional Court, claiming the constitutional illegitimacy of the incrimination of aiding suicide. The Court held that aiding suicide is lawful in certain specific cases, including when the person who commits suicide is dependent on a machine. The decision opened a wide debate throughout Europe on suicide and the incrimination of aid. The author addresses this issue, first by reconstructing Italian and German law, then by elaborating his own general theory on the lawfulness of aiding suicide in certain hypotheses. The theory, which takes a liberal and solidarity-based perspective, makes the body and its imprisonment the protagonist, as the only reliable criterion for establishing the authenticity of a suicide request.