The double suicide of an 86-year-old couple in Paris's luxury Lutetia Hotel has brought back to the fore the debate over euthanasia in France, reports FRANCE 24.
Georgette and Bernard Cazes took their own lives on Thursday evening, shortly after checking into the four-star hotel in the upscale Saint-Germain district, Le Parisien newspaper revealed.
They were found on Friday morning lying peacefully on the room’s bed, holding hands. They were wearing plastic bags over their heads, and none of the contents of the room had been disturbed.
The startling discovery was made by an employee who brought them room service breakfast, as per the couple’s request the previous day. The order was made so that “their bodies would be discovered quickly,” the French daily surmised.
Two documents were left behind by the ageing couple: one letter for family and one addressed to French legal authorities “demanding the right to die in a dignified manner”, according to sources cited by Le Parisien.
A son of the couple told the daily his parents had been planning their death "for years" and had chosen Hotel Lutetia for personal reasons: it was in the Art Nouveau building that Georgette Cazes had been reunited with her father upon his return from a prisoner camp at the end of World War II.
The husband Bernard Cazes was a retired high-ranking civil servant. He had been married to Georgette, described as a “bright intellectual” by acquaintances, for over sixty years.
It was not clear if one or both of them suffered from a painful or incurable illness.
Euthanasia in any form is illegal in France. In neighbouring Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium, as well as in the Netherlands, assisted suicide is either legal or has been decriminalised.
In 2005, France approved a law that allows patients, and in some cases their families, to decline extreme medical treatment keeping them alive despite their wishes.
French President François Hollande promised during his presidential campaign in 2012 to further look into the issue, but no reforms have been presented so far.
Hollande commissioned a six-month study on euthanasia last year. It concluded that active euthanasia -- that is, an act by a medical professional or other person meant to cause the patient to die -- should remain completely banned.
But it also recommended that the government acknowledge public opinion on assisted suicide, in which a patient is given a death-inducing drug to administer him or herself.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.