Ludwig Minelli, Founder of Swiss Assisted-Suicide Group, Dies at 92
Ludwig Minelli, a Swiss lawyer who founded an organization that helps people die by suicide, an act that he maintained was a fundamental exercise of free will, died on Saturday at his home in Forch, a village outside Zurich. He was 92.
Dignitas, the group he created in 1998, said in a statement that he took his own life with assistance.
The motto of Mr. Minelli’s organization is “To live with dignity — to die with dignity.” The group says it has aided more than 3,000 people in taking their own lives, which Mr. Minelli called “the last human right.”
“Everyone should be able to decide about their own death,” he told the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2019.
Suicide, Mr. Minelli told The Financial Times in 2023, is “a marvelous possibility,” and unlike some other advocates of assisted dying, he believed that the process should be open not just to the terminally ill.
It was an outlook that earned him the enmity of the Roman Catholic Church, the disapproval of many of his compatriots and the notice of Swiss prosecutors, who in 2018 charged him with taking advantage of clients.
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