Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern!

Yesterday’s cliffhanger was whether the River Aare here in Bern would break the record 23.93°C set last Wednesday? When I pressed send, it was 23.88°C and creeping up. As it turned out, the mercury peaked at 23.91°C – but I can confirm that the water was still glorious. However, record temperatures in Swiss lakes, rivers and streams obviously have a negative side. Read about that below.

© Keystone / Christian Beutler

In the news:  From shoplifting to fare-dodging, the Petty Theft Survey 2022 published today shows where and how often residents of Switzerland have stolen goods or used paid services without actually paying for them.

• The most common form of stealing is fare evasion on public transport. Almost four out of ten (39%) respondents said they had deliberately fare-dodged; 18% had done this more than once. More than a quarter (27%) admitted to having nicked something from their workplace at least once. Hotels and self-scanning at supermarkets are other popular areas for theft.
• Eleven river monitoring stations in Switzerland have recorded the highest temperatures since measurements began. Twenty-two further stations recorded record temperatures for July. In the long term the Federal Office for the Environment noted a clear trend towards increased temperatures in Swiss waters. Climate change meant further increases were to be expected in the coming decades, it said.
• Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) is cancelling around a dozen flights to Germany tomorrow, owing to a one-day strike over pay by ground staff at its German parent company Lufthansa. A spokeswoman said SWISS was informing its passengers and looking at alternative ways to get them to their destinations.

© Keystone / Georgios Kefalas

New guidelines on assisted suicide will hamper access to this practice and dismay foreigners seeking to end their lives legally in Switzerland.

In May the Swiss Medical Association agreed on the revised guidelines for the “Management of Dying and Death”. These now include making people have two meetings – at least two weeks apart – with a doctor before the final decision.

Alex Pandolfo, 68, lives in the UK. When he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2015, Lifecircle, an assisted suicide organisation in Basel, accepted his request for assisted suicide. He plans to go to Switzerland when “the time has come”. Under the old rules, he would have had to stay in Basel for just a few days, but the new two-week-rule makes it a lot more expensive. “People who don’t have enough money will be put off by it,” he told us.

Was the two-week-rule introduced to reduce the number of “suicide tourists”? The Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences merely states that the guidelines do not differentiate between Swiss nationals and foreigners at any point.

Travel expenses are not the only problem. Thirty-year old Aina from Japan suffers from a rare neurological condition. She has also been the given green light for her assisted suicide. But she worries about the rule which states that the “severity of the suffering is to be substantiated by a legitimate diagnosis and prognosis”. People who seek assisted suicide in Switzerland are required to explain in their own words the severity of their suffering and why they want to die. This letter must be submitted in addition to their medical record.

Aina’s illness is so debilitating that she cannot stand up or walk and is completely reliant on her mother. Her condition is different from terminal cancer. She will not die immediately and will probably suffer for a very long time. “If doctors use their own judgement to decide whether my illness meets the guidelines to use assisted suicide, what about my own right to decide?” she wonders. “Nobody else but me can judge how severe my suffering is and how badly I want to die because of it, but me. These new guidelines almost turn physicians into gods.”

Read more on what the new guidelines could mean for people like Alex Pandolfo and Aina in this article by SWI swissinfo.ch journalist Kaoru Uda.