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.
He was accused of arranging the suicide of a woman in order to pocket about $120,000 that she had left to Dignitas in her will, and of overcharging a mother and daughter. He called the charges “absurd” and was acquitted.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Minelli was a journalist with the German magazine Der Spiegel when the slow death of his grandmother, and her unmet desire to die more quickly, inspired a new vocation. He went to law school, became a human rights lawyer and, in 1992, became the legal adviser to Exit, a Swiss assisted-dying organization. He left six years later to create Dignitas.
The Swiss were pioneers of latter-day assisted suicide. Mr. Minelli’s group and several other organizations in the country emerged because of a 1942 law that allowed doctors to assist people who sought to end their own lives. (The Swiss law has been imitated in a raft of other countries — including the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Luxembourg, New Zealand and parts of Australia — as well as in 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.)
Unlike some similar organizations, Dignitas welcomed clients from around the world. That aroused opposition among Mr. Minelli’s fellow Swiss, who complained of “death tourism,” and the disapproval of certain journalists.
“The continuous parade of people who arrive living and leave dead lends Minelli’s operation a faintly industrial aspect,” Bruce Falconer wrote in a skeptical profile in The Atlantic in 2010.
Mr. Minelli rejected the death tourism charge. “Why should I agree to help a woman suffering from cancer in Geneva,” he said in a 2008 interview with the newspaper Le Monde, “while refusing to help another lady suffering from the same thing in Annemasse, on the other side of the border?”
In its early years, Dignitas was forced to move several times because of local opposition, but it now has a permanent headquarters in Forch and a staff of several dozen.
About 10,000 donating “members” receive potential access to its services in exchange for a one-off payment of 220 Swiss francs (about $275) and an annual fee of at least 80 francs ($100), depending on ability to pay. The cost of an assisted suicide is 11,000 francs (about $13,750) if Dignitas must handle the funeral arrangements, and 7,500 francs ($9,400) if not.
Mr. Minelli said that Dignitas had never started an interaction with a patient by counseling death. “We first have a discussion, looking for solutions that favor life,” he told Le Monde. Of those members who got what he called a “provisional green light,” he added, only about 12 percent ended up going through with the process.
In its brochure, Dignitas says its procedure for assisted suicide includes an in-depth evaluation of a written request and accompanying medical information and at least two face-to-face meetings with a doctor.
Under Swiss law, the doctor is not allowed to administer the prescribed deadly cocktail, pentobarbital sodium. (Mr. Minelli acknowledged that Dignitas sometimes struggled to find doctors willing to work with the organization.)
“The patient must be able to undertake the last act — that is to swallow, to administer via the gastric tube or to open the valve of the intravenous access tube — him or herself,” Dignitas says. “If this is not possible, Dignitas is unfortunately unable to help.”
Ludwig Amadeus Minelli was born in Zurich on Dec. 5, 1932, the eldest of four children of Lodovico Minelli, a house painter, and Adelheid (Ackermann) Minelli. He grew up in Küsnacht, a village on Lake Zurich. He attended the University of Zurich, worked for his father’s painting company and went to work for the now-closed newspaper Die Tat in 1956.
Mr. Minelli became Der Spiegel’s first Swiss correspondent in 1964 and wrote for it for 10 years. In 1977, when he began studying law at the University of Zurich, he founded the Swiss Society for the European Convention on Human Rights. (He had covered the convention’s ratification as a journalist.) He received his law degree in 1981 and was admitted to the bar in 1986.
Mr. Minelli is survived by his daughters Michèle and Caroline Minelli, his partner, Liselotte Strickler; his sister, Maria Minelli; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Minelli viewed Dignitas and organizations like it as advocating for personal freedom over taboos and entrenched power structures.
“In our societies, a person thinking of suicide can’t approach anyone else without fear of being put in a psychiatric hospital,” he told Le Monde.
“It’s a question of power,” he added. “In some milieus, they simply cannot accept that an individual should have the freedom to choose his own death. Doctors can’t accept it, because it goes against their power over patients. It also goes against the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial, the churches and politicians.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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