“Belgium is the first country in the world not to look away from the unbearable suffering conditions that can affect young people as well. Belgian rules provide sufficient safeguards to prevent the abuses and the oppression, that occur in the clandestineness, to which we are condemned by such laws like the Italian ones,”, Mina Welby and Marco Cappato @ Luca Coscioni Association say.

Unfortunately, the Italian media, including public service broadcasting, only address the issue to pursue cases in the news. They pretend not to know that illegal euthanasia is a reality practiced on minors as well, while Belgium has been the first country in the world to have the courage to guarantee rules for patients, their families and doctors. Unfortunately, the Belgian case will be certainly used as a bogeyman to avoid an assumption of responsibility by the Italian policy and to continue to look away.

“For our part,” Welby and Cappato conclude, “we continue the action of civil disobedience and arrange to meet you at the XIII Congress of the Luca Coscioni Association, to be held in Naples from September 20 to October 2.”