Swiss firm Dignitas is under pressure to stop offering suicide to non-nationals, writes Derek Scally
Dignitas, the Zurich-based assisted suicide organisation, is facing increasing pressure from Swiss authorities to stop offering its services to non-Swiss citizens.
The organisation has rarely been out of the headlines in Switzerland this year since it was evicted from the rented Zurich apartment where it helped the terminally ill kill themselves.
Then, last week, Dignitas made headlines again after helping two German men take their lives in cars in a Zurich car park.
The Tagesanzeigernewspaper marked the deaths with a ghoulish cartoon showing the hooded figure of Death complaining: "They're operating out of car parks now, I'll have to buy a GPS device."
The car park deaths have provoked a furore in Switzerland and Germany and show how, nine years after Dignitas was set up by Swiss lawyer Ludwig Minelli, the issue of assisted suicide continues to cause controversy in Switzerland.
Minelli, 74, says he is providing a necessary service - providing terminally ill people with a place where they can peacefully take their lives with an overdose of barbiturates.
But Swiss authorities are concerned that "suicide tourism" is bad for Switzerland's image, while outright critics call it a cynical business costing terminally ill patients nearly €5,000 a time.
Switzerland outlaws active euthanasia, saying that "whoever lures someone into suicide or provides assistance to commit suicide out of a self-interested motivation will, on completion of the suicide, be punished with up to five years' imprisonment."
Dignitas has taken that wording to mean that it is legal to provide indirect assistance as long as the person carries out the final act themselves.
Five Swiss organisations offer assisted suicide services and Dignitas is the best known.
Last year 195 people, 120 from Germany alone, travelled to the Dignitas apartment in Zurich's Gertrudstrasse to end their lives. Two years ago, one of the visitors was a multiple sclerosis sufferer from Cork.
But, after eight years, neighbours finally had enough of strangers arriving every other day at the apartment only to be carried out, hours later, in a coffin.
Last July, they blocked access to a Dignitas official, forcing him to leave again with the terminally ill woman he had left waiting in the car outside.
The landlord cancelled the rental agreement on the apartment days later claiming that, by charging for its services, Dignitas was engaged in illegal commercial activity in a residential apartment.
Though homeless, Dignitas carried on regardless. The organisation began checking its customers into luxury hotels and, in at least one case, Minelli allowed a woman kill herself at his apartment.
After the local authorities expressly banned a repeat of the procedure, the organisation ended up in a woodlands car park.
"We can't turn people away. Those who are ready to die are often in a situation where they can't wait so we offer them the alternatives of a hotel room, a car or a caravan," said Minelli, in a rare interview, to the Neue Zürcher Zeitungnewspaper.
He blames the authorities for the difficult circumstances in which his organisation is now operating.
"When I told one man we were having difficulties and that the waiting period was now eight weeks he threw himself from the landing of his apartment block."
A recent survey by the Democsope agency shows that 54 per cent of Swiss citizens support assisted suicide for the terminally ill while a further 27 per cent are in favour of general assisted suicide provisions. Some 15 per cent are against all forms of assisted suicide.
However, 54 per cent of those polled rejected so-called "suicide tourism".
Minelli's critics say, with this latest step, he is rejecting his organisation's own slogan: "Live with dignity, die with dignity."
"Human dignity is being trampled on," said Hans-Peter Portmann, a Zurich politician and president of the foundation that runs Zurich's Lighthouse Hospice, on Swiss radio.
Most of the loudest critics of Dignitas do not oppose assisted suicide itself, but the fly-by-night way in which it is practised.
They have demanded quality standard guidelines and stricter supervision of Dignitas and similar organisations.
Some even support Minelli's demand on the authorities for a permanent home for the organisation.
However, Dignitas rejects further state controls, such as mandatory interviews or a law allowing its volunteers to assist at a maximum of 12 deaths per year.
For its part, the Swiss government blocked proposals for a minimum level of state supervision last August, saying that no involvement was necessary.
As the row rolls on at home, Dignitas is winning prominent support from abroad for its campaign.
Sharon Osbourne, wife and manager of Ozzy Osbourne, told the Daily Mirrorin September that she had contacted Dignitas after watching her father die of Alzheimer's.
"We believe 100 per cent in euthanasia so have drawn up plans to go to . . . Switzerland if we ever have an illness that affects our brains," she told the newspaper.
"If Ozzy or I ever got Alzheimer's, that's it - we'd be off," she said.
In the same month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy received a posthumous message from French theatre actress Maia Simon who had been suffering from cancer and ended her life with the help of Dignitas on September 19th.
According to France's Liberationnewspaper, the actress said: "Life belongs not to the one who stands by the bed but to the one who suffers."