The Experience of a Criminal Law Scholar in the Italian National Committee for Bioethics

Abstract

The contribution traces the institutional and cultural role of the National Committee for Bioethics (CNB), focusing on its consultative, proactive, and public awareness-raising functions, as well as the variety of its documents (opinions, responses, and motions). Through the author’s direct experience as a member of the Committee, the text highlights the deeply dialogic and interdisciplinary nature of the CNB’s work, understood as authentic “intellectual adventure”. Some emblematic opinions are then analyzed, particularly regarding informed consent, refusal and renunciation of healthcare treatments, deep palliative sedation, mechanical restraint, management of healthcare resources during the Covid-19 pandemic, and protection of fundamental rights in prison settings. In the complex, the CNB’s decisive contribution to the construction of a normative and cultural framework respectful of human dignity, the freedom of nation-self-determinations, and constitutional principles emerges, with particular attention to contexts of greater vulnerability.