EXIT’s board of directors had wanted to restrict the service to within the borders of Switzerland as it was becoming difficult to obtain the necessary documentation from abroad and to arrange journeys to Switzerland.
But earlier this year, Swiss media reported that the proposal was not being viewed favourably by members. For this reason, EXIT’s directors decided to drop the proposal.
“Due to the resistance, the association’s board decided to keep the current membership requirements unchanged,” EXIT Vice President Jürg Wiler said in a statementExternal link.
Only around 1% of the 913 people who used EXIT’s services last year lived abroad.
Swiss law tolerates assisted suicide when patients commit the act themselves and helpers have no vested interest in their death. Assisted suicide has been legal in the country since the 1940s.
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Yoshi travels from Japan to Switzerland to die
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A Japanese man came all the way to Switzerland to die. SWI swissinfo.ch accompanied him on the final part of his journey. This is his story.
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Switzerland legalised assisted suicide in the 1940s. More than 1,000 seriously ill or disabled people end their lives with the help of suicide assistants in Switzerland each year.
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Yoshi travels from Japan to Switzerland to die
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A Japanese man came all the way to Switzerland to die. SWI swissinfo.ch accompanied him on the final part of his journey. This is his story.
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In August last year, the group warned that legal hurdles to euthanasia in other countries were making it increasingly difficult to offer its services to people outside of Switzerland. At the time, some 2,600 EXIT members lived abroad. The organisation asked members if it should stop its services at Swiss borders. But according to the…
Assisted suicide option remains in demand in Switzerland
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There were no reported assisted suicides due to Covid-19, but the pandemic did force EXIT to reduce its activities between March 20 and May 20 last year, the organisation said on Monday. EXIT Deutsche Schweiz, which covers the German and Italian-speaking parts of the country, saw a rise of 51 assisted suicides as it helped…
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Between 1991 and 2011 the Swiss suicide rate fell from 20.7 per 100,000 population to 11.2 per 100,000 – a period which also saw a dramatic increase in antidepressant use across Europe. A London School of Economics study published in the online journal PLOS ONE earlier this year found that antidepressant use among 29 European…
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