Officials have uncovered evidence that two clinics in Switzerland are
helping clients to die who are simply depressed rather than suffering
from incurable pain.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the clinics have been accused of
failing to carry out proper investigations into whether patients meet
the requirements of Switzerland's right-to-die laws.
Andreas Brunner, the senior prosecutor of the Zurich canton, told
The Sunday Telegraph, "We are not trying to ban the so-called death
tourism, but the outsourcing of suicide must be put under stricter
control. Prosecutors look into every suicide, assisted or not,
and there are many cases where it is not clear whether the assisted
person has chosen death in full possession of their decision-making
capacity. But investigations are difficult due to lack of evidence
after the suicide. We, therefore, demand that the federal
government amend the legislation to enable closer and lengthier
monitoring of suicide patients before their deaths."
Swiss laws allow doctors to provide "passive suicide assistance" to
people who are terminally ill or in great suffering, with patients
given a cocktail of drugs that they must administer themselves.
Dignitas and Exit International are two clinics that offer the drugs
and are where most of the 300 “assisted suicides” that
occur in the country each year take place.
Questions over the practice first surfaced when it emerged that a
67-year-old German woman who committed suicide with help from Dignitas
had presented the clinic with faked papers saying that she was dying of
cirrhosis of the liver. It turned out that she had been suffering from
alcoholism and depression.
Dr. Daniel Hell, of the Swiss National Advisory Commission on
Biomedical Ethics, a government regulatory body, said: "We suspect
there could have been cases where people who suffered from a temporary
depression have been helped to their deaths."
Technorati Tags: suicide, suffering, killing
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