SWITZERLAND

9 February 2007
DIGNITAS attacks the Vatican in a German Newspaper

Munich, Germany. The Swiss non-profit organisation DIGNITAS, which has since 1998 provided in Switzerland some 700 assisted suicides to persons from 25 countries all over the world who wanted to end their lives, has attacked the Vatican in an advertisement in the Munich newspaper «Sueddeutsche Zeitung»

This advertisement appears in its weekend edition reproaching the present and the late pope of being responsible for millions of victims of AIDS in Africa and Asia, and the fact that millions of children in these continents have lost their parents because of the «anticondom policy» of the Catholic church.

The organisation calls the Vatican's decision to forbid - in the interest of the dogma of sanctity of life - a catholic service for the funeral of Piergiorgio Welby, who died in December 2006 after having asked physicians to switch off his breathing machine, a «nasty hypocrisy».

The advertisement was first scheduled to be published in the German news magazine «Der Spiegel» on January 15th, but stopped at the last minute by a decision of its editor-in-chief, Stefan Aust, without giving any explanation about the reasons to DIGNITAS.

Piergiorgio Welby was a victim of motor neurone disease, forced to be ventilated day and night by a breathing aid machine due to his illness. For a long time, he had asked for the machine to be to be switched off in order to finally be able to die.

He even made a public appeal to the president of the Italian Republic as well as to an Italian court. The president asked the politicians to pay attention to the issue, but the court denied him any legal help. Thereafter, a physician of Cremona, Marco Riccio, administered Welby a sedative and, after his patient was without consciousness, stopped the machine.

Only by this means, Welby had a chance to die in accordance with his own ideas. As a consequence, the Vatican then denied a funeral service for Welby pretending that he had not paid attention to the catholic dogma of sanctity of life.

In its advertisement, DIGNITAS deplores this «nasty hypocrisy»; on one hand, the church, due to its dogma of sanctity of life, has no mercy at all with patients in cases in which a natural end is no longer possible due to medical technique; but on the other hand, the popes John Paul II. from Poland and Benedict XVI. from Bavaria are responsible for «millions of dead people of AIDS and millions of children who have lost their parents due to the anti-condom policy of the church».

By saying that «history will have to classify this behaviour in relation with the behaviour of the powerful in the 20th and 21st century», the organisation is obviously comparing these two leaders of the Catholic Church to Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung who are considered to be the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century.

DIGNITAS also quotes the catholic Saint Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of the English King Henry IV., who as early as 1517 told in his novel «Utopia» that patients whose pains can no longer be controlled with pain killers should be counselled either to stop eating in order to induce their death by their own, or to give their consent to being given opium in order to fall in a sleep from which they will never wake up again.

In addition, the readers are informed that the Swiss Federal Court
(Supreme Court) has recently ruled that the right to decide about manner and moment of one's own death is a part of the right of self-determination guaranteed by Article 8 paragraph 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, a convention with legal force in 46 European countries. This right, so the court ruled, also applies to mentally ill people as long as they have capacity of discernment, and that Swiss physicians are entitled to write the necessary prescription for a lethal dose of Sodium Pentobarbital.

The advertisement in the «Sueddeutsche Zeitung» also says that the founder and secretary general of DIGNITAS, Ludwig A. Minelli, a Human Rights lawyer of the Zurich bar, is the person responsible for its content.

More news from Switzerland