January 10, 2026
Suspended Prison Sentences for Ultime Liberté
Suspended prison sentences for activists from the Ultime Liberté association, which supports assisted suicide, for trafficking barbiturates
On Friday, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced twelve retired activists from the Ultime Liberté association, aged between 75 and 89, to suspended prison sentences of up to 10 months for helping dozens of people obtain pentobarbital between 2018 and 2020, in the midst of a parliamentary debate on end-of-life issues in France.
Amid parliamentary debates on end-of-life issues, the Paris Criminal Court on Friday sentenced twelve radical assisted suicide activists to up to 10 months’ suspended prison terms for trafficking barbiturates.
Tried between mid-September and early October, twelve members of the association Ultime Liberté, aged between 75 and 89, were all found guilty of having, between August 2018 and November 2020, helped dozens of people to buy pentobarbital, a barbiturate that causes rapid and painless death, on the internet.
These pensioners, who were only prosecuted for offences related to trafficking in illicit substances and not for incitement or assistance to suicide, used their trial this autumn as a platform to discuss assisted dying.
The sentences handed down range from a €2,000 fine, including a €1,000 suspended fine, to a 10-month suspended prison sentence for the founder of the association, Claude Hury, whom the judges criticised for her ‘amateurism in supporting’ people who wish to die.
Before a packed courtroom of elderly people who had come to show their support, the president of the 31st chamber began by stating that ‘the court is not disconnected from social issues and developments.
It is fully aware of the movement desired by the vast majority of French people with regard to end-of-life issues’.
However, while the Senate is examining this month the bill creating a right to assisted dying, which would significantly change French legislation, ‘the defendants cannot expect a criminal court to act as a legislator and anticipate the advent of a law’.
Even if their actions were motivated solely by their humanitarian commitment, practised outside any medical framework, the court was concerned about the ‘extremism’ of some of the activists advocating ‘unlimited freedom’ to end one’s life, beyond the case of people who are ill and in great suffering.
Highly divisive, born in 2009 from the split of the most radical fringe of the large pro-euthanasia organisation ADMD, Ultime Liberté claims the right to a ‘peaceful’ suicide for any person in full possession of their faculties, whether sick or not.
‘We didn’t kill anyone, we simply helped. We made a gesture of humanity towards people who asked for it,’ said Claude Hury, a 76-year-old retired teacher, after the verdict was handed down, announcing that she would appeal the decision.
One of the defence lawyers, Frédéric Verra, welcomed ‘a relatively symbolic sentence that shows the court’s discomfort’.
The activist doctor Bernard Senet, who admits to having performed euthanasia during his medical career, was given a six-month suspended prison sentence.
With its parade of doctors and intellectuals specialising in the subject, as well as anonymous individuals who had helped their loved ones to end their lives, the trial sketched out before the court the hidden continent of assisted dying for patients in great suffering.
An illegal act, but one nevertheless practised throughout France, in the secrecy of families, behind the closed doors of bedrooms.
In a testimony as unexpected as it was moving, a priest modestly confessed in court that he had resorted to assisted suicide for his father, who was suffering from terminal cancer, contrary to religious dogma.
“He had made me swear to end his suffering when the time came. It was a double punishment for me because I kept my word. As a son, it was very difficult to live with.
“As a Christian and a priest, it was almost schizophrenic: “Thou shalt not kill,”” said the imposing clergyman in a black cassock and Roman collar, quoting the Bible.
Drawing a parallel between the movement for assisted dying and the campaign for the legalisation of abortion in the early 1970s, many witnesses welcomed the legislative and societal progress that they believe would be represented by the bill passed at first reading in May by the National Assembly, which the Senate will debate at the end of January.
This bill, proposed by MoDem MP Olivier Falorni, would create a ‘right to assisted dying’ in France.
It would legalise assisted suicide and, in exceptional cases, euthanasia, without these words, which are considered to have negative connotations, appearing in the text.
