The Czech Bill on palliative care, end-of-life decision-making, and euthanasia in light of Belgian legislative experience
Doležal Adam, Van Assche Kristof, Doležal Tomáš · 2026
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Description
Adam Doležal, Van Assche, and Tomáš Doležal analyse a 2024 Czech bill that would regulate all end-of-life practices in one statute. It covers palliative care, stopping life-sustaining treatment, palliative sedation, and assisted death in both its forms. Belgium, whose law shaped the Czech draft, split these across separate statutes. Their 2026 study tests the bill against Belgian practice and European human rights law.
For routine care the bill creates a legal right, names treatment that is medically inadequate as the threshold for limiting care, and wraps decisions in safeguards. These include information, patient participation, ethics committee mediation, and court review. Assisted death requires an incurable illness that cannot be reversed, with unbearable suffering, then passes through staged requests, an outside opinion, and after-the-fact review by a commission. The authors judge the draft a coherent step toward human rights law, with suggestions for refinement.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Doležal Adam, Van Assche Kristof, Doležal Tomáš |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 65 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |