Assisted dying: BonSens.org sues four judges of the Constitutional Council for "conflict of interest"

After the Lecornu referral, the challenge to the Falorni law targets the inner conscience of the judges called upon to decide. A new legal front, but one whose impact is more symbolic than operational.

The fact

The association BonSens.org filed an "external contribution" with the Constitutional Council on July 18, 2026, currently seized by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of the Falorni law on end-of-life assistance. This contribution alerts to the major flaws of the project: lack of traceability of consent, criteria for access deemed too broad, risks related to organ donation at the end of life. It explicitly requests the recusal of several members of the Council on the grounds of previous public positions. A complementary complaint for "misuse of influence" targeting four of the nine members has also been filed with the Paris public prosecutor. The move comes in the days following the constitutional referral, the last hurdle before promulgation.

Our reading

We had said that the legal battle would shift to the ground of procedural defects. It does, and one step further: that of the personal suspicion cast on the judges themselves. On the legal admissibility, the approach is fragile. Case law admits that a member of the Constitutional Council may have taken a public position, in a previous political life, on a subject that he will have to judge; Article 4 of the Organic Ordinance of November 7, 1958 frames conflicts of interest without drawing a systematic recusal. On the symbolic scope, the act is eloquent: it records in the file that the defenders of life no longer find, in France, an instance whose impartiality they can believe to be serene. Evangelium Vitae recalls that "a civil law that would authorize or legitimize abortion or euthanasia would, by that very fact, be in radical contradiction not only with the good of the person, but with the common good" (n° 72), and that the conscientious objection of the Catholic citizen remains always open (n° 73).

To ponder

A democracy that must challenge its own judges admits that the democratic debate has not taken place. The approach of BonSens.org will probably not change the decision of the Council. It records that the law promulgated will be against the documented opposition of a significant part of the social body and of the entire French episcopate. Pray for the judges called upon to rule, and for those who, in conscience, will refuse to lend a hand to what the Church names without detour a culture of death.