The founder and director of the Swiss right-to-die organization Dignitas decided end your life this Saturday, according to the company itself.
In a four-page tribute, Dignitas said he “stood firm in his convictions in defending fundamental rights and civil liberties.”
Just as he explained that “the association will continue to be managed and developed in the spirit of its founder as an international, professional and combative organization for self-determination and freedom of choice in life and at the end of life.
Minelli founded the clinic in 1998 to help people die terminal and chronic illnesses under the motto “Live with dignity, die with dignity.”
The human rights lawyer explained to the Daily Mail that there were no limits on who could be helped to die, as long as they had the mental capacity to make the decision. “It’s unconditional. A human right has no conditionsexcept capacity,” he stated.
“Until the end of his life he continued to look for more ways to help people achieve freedom of choice and self-determination in their ‘last things,’ and he found them often,” Dignitas explains. In fact, in an interview he gave to Financial Times In 2023, when he was 90 years old, he explained that he still “worked all day and half the night.”
Dignitas, which he claims to have more than 10,000 membersalso offers its services to people living outside the country, and by 2024, the organization would have helped more than 4,000 people end their lives.
Lawyer by profession
Ludwig Minelli was a lawyer by profession and in his professional career he faced numerous legal challenges and filed several successful appeals before the Swiss Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
All that work achieved changes in Swiss legislation. Among them, in 2011, he got the ECHR recognized the right of a person to decide the manner and timing of the end of his life.
In Swissthe law does not allow euthanasiaunderstood as the situation in which a doctor or another person administers a lethal injection. However, Yeah which is legal—has been for decades— assisted dyingthat is, when a person expresses his desire to die and commits the lethal act.