For Rui Nunes, “this is the only way to ensure a serious, profound and rigorous debate in areas so complex from a technical standpoint and so complicated in an ethical perspective.”


In the view of Nunes, who is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, “it is crucial that the parties publicly discuss the proposal for a national referendum on the practice of euthanasia.”


“The candidate parties to the legislative elections in October have an obligation to submit their proposals and ideas (…), rather than what happened in the current legislature,” Nunes said, referring to the various proposals on euthanasia that in this term were voted on in parliament.


Nunes added that “even among the MPs, the theme is controversial and divisive.”


“A sign of this is the fact that the proposals for the legalisation of euthanasia have been rejected in parliament by very small margins,” he stressed.


Nunes was appointed last April to the team of counsellors of Pope Francis in the areas of human dignity considering the challenges of science and technology.