The British legal system is running amok. After fining a shopkeeper with a whopping £5000 for using imperial measures, it lets go free of court the man who dumped tons of garbage into Kent’s countryside while local residents are fined with £20 for an open bin lid. Next it lets go free a woman who had sex with a 14 year old and a day later a further paedophiliac found naked in bed with a 15 year old walks also out of court unharmed. But now it prosecutes parents who travelled with their invalid son to Switzerland for just that, accompanying an invalid.

A 23 year old invalid rugby player decides to commit suicide because he can’t bear the prison his body has become. Lamed from the chest downwards he apparently can’t do it himself and decides on going to Switzerland to commit a helped suicide there. In a wheelchair you don’t usually hop on the next bus or train to travel to the Continent, and personally I would think less of his parents if they hadn’t accompanied him. But suddenly, helping an invalid is made a crime.

Instead of going after the parents, who did nothing but being caring, loving parents accepting the decision of their son to commit suicide, the police should go after the real culprit in this show: The organisation called Dignitas, based in Switzerland. Because there are facts that seem to be unknown to the public in the Anglo-Saxon world, it is high time to give a detailed account of what is going on in Switzerland.

In Switzerland an assisted suicide is legal; helpers are only prosecuted if they are acting in self-interest. In 1998 an organisation was formed by lawyer Ludwig Minelli by the name of Dignitas. All the helpers of Dignitas are volunteers. Still the organisation charges a stiff £1500 per case. The question is, for what is it charging?

The biggest misconstruction I find in all the news is Dignitas being called a clinic. There is no clinic, there never was a clinic. During the last 12 months, Dignitas has changed addresses several times, sometimes during a client’s preparation for suicide. It went several weeks without an address at all and serviced its clients in the back of a van standing somewhere in the wood on the edge of a road. At another time it was in a one room apartment in a little village situated directly next to the kindergarten, and every second hour a pail would be borne past the little children’s’ playground.

Dignitas is commonly called a non-profit organisation by the press. But it cashes in heavily on each suicide case. The exact final destinations of the moneys coming in are not particularly clear, because the cost for the doctor in attendance to write out the death certificate and the rent of the apartment are relatively small. There is one obvious beneficiary to spring to mind, though.

While being heavily hit by Swiss press and Television, Dignitas kept on doing business as usual. Because its doctors had come under close scrutiny by the public, these shady individuals withdrew from servicing Dignitas with the ‘death cocktail’. Dignitas was then found to be using Helium gas that clients had to inhale to suffocate. Helium was also used in German concentration camps during the War.

A national referendum is planned for next year whereby the suicide clause in Swiss law would be restricted strictly to the terminally ill and Swiss nationals. A referendum is usually organised by one or several political parties or organisations to get parliament o set up a particular law. It has to be submitted to the Chancellery prior to start and then has to bring in the signatures of 50,000 Swiss nationals within nine months to become valid. After that, the parliament has 24 months time to formulate the law and bring it before the people in a national vote.

I strongly urge the press and all media here to stop calling Dignitas a clinic. If people knew how sordid a thing it is, less would be willing to go there.