In Switzerland the law allows people to be helped to end their lives as long as the patient is mentally fit to make that decision and the helper is not motivated by self-interest. Dignitas is one of the country’s four non-medical right-to-die organizations. But while it and Exit International both help foreign nationals, the other two only assist Swiss people.
Dignitas was founded in Zurich in 1988 by Ludwig Minelli, a magazine journalist turned lawyer. Minelli says that his group lets people exercise “the last human right: the ability to decide how and when somebody would like to end one’s own life.”
A hugely controversial figure, Minelli has previously provoked criticism for allowing people with mental disorders, not just those with terminal physical conditions, to end their lives at Dignitas. In April he said that he would like Dignitas to also be allowed to help healthy people die. He explained that he wanted to help a Canadian woman who was well to realize her desire to die with her ill husband. He advocated almost no limitations on assisting people with their deaths, calling it “a marvelous possibility.”
The first Briton to die at Dignitas, an unnamed man from Cambridge who had throat cancer, did so in late 2002. Ex-docker Reg Crew, who had motor neurone disease, became the first Briton to be named as using Dignitas when he went there in January 2003, accompanied by his wife Win and a British TV news crew.
“I’d never say I was tired of life, but I’m tired of the life I’m in and I know I am never going to be cured,” 74-year-old Crew said.
People who go to Dignitas see death as a release and are frustrated that assisting a suicide is illegal in Britain. Anne Turner, a retired family planning expert who had the incurable brain disease supranuclear palsy, died at Dignitas in January 2006. She had seen her husband and brother endure lingering deaths from similar conditions. “Doctors should be able to help people to die. I always quote the fact that I had a cat and I had him put down because he was riddled with cancer, but we cannot do that with humans,” Turner said.
In all 115 Britons have ended their lives at Dignitas so far. As the right to die has become a key moral and medical issue, so the numbers of Britons using Dignitas has grown: from one in 2002 to 15 in 2003 and 26 in 2006. However, Dignitas currently has 786 British members who they will want its help.
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
An article published in the Dec. 12, 1949, edition of the Central Daily News (中央日報) bore a headline with the intimidating phrase: “You Cannot Escape.” The article was about the execution of seven “communist spies,” some say on the basis of forced confessions, at the end of the 713 Penghu Incident. Those were different times, born of political paranoia shortly after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) relocated to Taiwan following defeat in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The phrase was a warning by the KMT regime to the local populace not to challenge its power or threaten national unity. The
Since taking office, President William Lai (賴清德) has been an active proponent of the Healthy Taiwan initiative. As a member of the Healthy Taiwan Promotion Committee, I have also contributed recommendations on various pharmaceutical policies. After the committee concluded its seventh meeting on Saturday last week, Lai announced that the government is considering a three-year suspension on the Drug Expenditure Target (DET) system’s routine drug price surveys, highlighting the need to further support drug supply resilience. While I am supportive of this policy direction, I must also stress the importance of maintaining our original objective of improving the quality of
RSS