2023-04-26 04:00:25
Lhe citizens’ convention on the end of life (CCFV) has just ended at the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE). The report drawn up by the 184 citizens who made it up was submitted to the President of the Republic. Comments have multiplied in the media. It is as much public space for subjects that our society usually tends to conceal: the end of life and the sufferings which sometimes accompany it, but also the sharing of powers which is then played out between a human being, his entourage, and all those who have made it their mission – professional or voluntary – to support them. So much space to discuss a still uncertain evolution of French law and a necessary renewal of our democracy.
Having followed, as “researchers-observers”, the unfolding of this convention, it seems to us that the ways in which it is referred to do not value enough what should give food for thought: the mobilization of citizens and the lessons to draw from it for the future. Scholarly analyzes published on the subject of deliberative democracy mechanisms reflect the issues concerning their status, as well as the system effects they have with representative democracy. They describe them finely, whether to praise them or to present them as the tricks of a neo-liberalism in need of legitimacy. Too few of them emphasize one of the most remarkable redundancies of these processes: the dynamic and innovative practice that citizens have of them.
What we observed with emotion is, beyond their social, cultural, age and political orientation diversity, an extraordinary commitment to the civic function that they were asked to perform. When a citizen confides in us that her “family is proud that she is here”or when a citizen informs us of the feeling that he “lives here one of the most beautiful moments of his life”all of this testifies to a vibrant and generous humanity, transcended by the system put in place by the ESEC, which remarkably accompanied their deliberations.
The same commitment
When one of them says: “What is happening here is magnificent, but it is our duty to report it in our living environments” ; when we note that many of them have taken the initiative to organize debates in their region and/or with their local elected representatives, to have visited nursing homes or palliative care units, we must observe that the collective involved in this democratic debate is much broader than that observed in the premises of the EESC.
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