GENEVA — A Swiss group has gained notoriety by offering assisted suicide to foreign visitors, mainly terminally-ill people, allowing them to take advantage of relatively permissive laws in Switzerland compared to European neighbors.
"It shows a lack of respect" for the community to end someone’s life in such circumstances, Geneva local official Markus Gossweiler told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Friday, November 9.
Dignitas is helping people die in anonymous hotel rooms and even rental vans amid renewed controversy the so-called "suicide tourism" in the liberal European country.
In the latest case to spark media and political ire at home and abroad, two German men were helped to their deaths last week in a van in a muddy lay-by in the small town of Maur, near Zurich.
The two men, aged 50 and 65 respectively, committed suicide within two days of each other in the same parking area.
Under Swiss law, a terminally-ill person may be given "passive" assistance to suicide, such as being supplied with a lethal dose of a drug, provided it is not done for selfish motives or for gain.
Active assistance, including helping the person to take the drug or administering it, is forbidden.
Since 1998, Dignitas operated out of an apartment in Zurich, but was obliged to leave earlier this year, reportedly after neighbors expressed growing alarm about the number of coffins seen in the street.