Hot off the Press:
Right-to-die group barred from premises
ZURICH (Reuters) – Right-to-die group Dignitas has been barred from its premises in a Zurich suburb after neighbors objected to the use of the apartment for assisted suicides, the local council said Wednesday.
It was the second blow for the non-profit association this year, after it was forced to move from a previous suburban Zurich apartment when residents complained.
Last week, the local council ordered the charity to stop using the new apartment and apply to change its official function from a residence to an “assisted suicide flat.”
“Dignitas continued to ignore the ban and still carried out assisted suicides,” council official Daniel Scheidegger told Reuters. “So we decided to enforce the ban.”
It’s apparent that no matter what Swiss attitudes are about euthanasia and assisted suicide, there’s a strong sentiment against having one’s neighborhood cluttered up with people being carted out in body bags on a regular basis.
Unsurprisingly, Reuters journalist Tom Armitage manages to once again misrepresent just who is “eligible” for suicide assistance in Switzerland:
The laws, some of the most liberal in the world, have led in recent years to “suicide tourism,” where terminally ill foreigners travel to Switzerland to die.
Armitage must not read the British press, which has carried stories about non-terminally ill Brits who have gone to Switzerland for “assistance” in committing suicide, as mentioned in this BBC piece on Dignitas:
The group, based in Zurich, has caught the headlines as people with chronic diseases from around the world travel to Switzerland to ask for its help in committing suicide.
Armitage must have been asleep when the news came out that Switzerland’s Supreme Court gave the “thumbs up” to assisting the suicides of some people with psychiatric labels.
We should all have an open and honest debate about these issues. But sometimes it’s hard to see how there’s a hope of having one when basic factual misinformation like this keeps getting re-reported. –Stephen Drake