Mr. Silvan Luley:

I will start with the question on proposed laws. One of the main aims of our organisation is that people from abroad do not come to Switzerland to make use of the Swiss legal framework of assisted suicide but rather can have this choice at home. Court judgments over the past 15 years have supported that. The European Court of Human Rights stated it is a human freedom and human right to decide on the time and manner of your own end in life, provided you have the mental capacity to make such a decision and are able to act accordingly. This human rights judgment has been supported by the German and Austrian constitutional courts.

The constitutional court made it quite clear that there is a right to decide on the time and manner of the end of one's own life and that there is a right to reach out for support by third persons to put that into practice. On top of that, it is unconditional. Certainly the person has to be mentally competent and be able to act himself or herself but it is unconditional in the sense of eligibility criteria like suffering from a terminal or grievous illness or from a psychiatric illness.

In response to the much earlier question about grappling with suffering, Professor Boer quite rightly referred to the definition of health by the World Health Organization, which holds that health is much more than just not being ill. It is a complete thing includes being socially and emotionally healthy too. If we take that as a base then it is quite clear that if we judge what is suffering for the other person or we say that only people with a terminal illness that is going to end their life in six months can end their lives and if we set these as eligibility criteria, this is in conflict with the European Convention on Human Rights, with the European Court of Human Rights judgment and constitutional court judgments. It is discriminatory against people who would not fall within the eligibility criteria. On top of that, it makes things worse in that those people who would not be eligible will still either use violent methods or go to Switzerland, Belgium or other countries. We must be clear that this is a human right which is basically unconditional apart from the person being competent and able to act accordingly.

Regarding law proposals, Dignitas has engaged in many legal proceedings and court judgments. All of the court judgments that I mentioned have either been initiated or led by Dignitas. We were also involved in the Canadian court proceedings. We have contributed to Australian public inquiries and have talked to British committees on the issue on several occasions. When we made legal proposals, they were always a copy of the Swiss model. We put our legal framework into a single Act with explanatory notes and provided that documentation to explain how the Swiss model works. Of course, at the end of the day, it is up to each country, on the basis of the culture of the people in that country, to decide what law they want or to what extent they want to have an assisted dying law. What is good for the Dutch people and what they think is right for them to have as a law is not necessarily a good thing for Ireland or for Switzerland. Switzerland has its own way of dealing with this, its own history and cultural background. We show our system as a role model but at the end of the day, this is not about what Dignitas or Switzerland has or wants. The European Court of Human Rights has said that it is a basic human right to decide on the time and manner of the end of one's own life. It is up to this committee and the people of Ireland to decide, in a democratic process, what to have at the end.

In terms of whether legalising assisted dying reduces the number of violent suicides, the difficulty is that the research is much more advanced in some countries than it is in others and the question is to what extent one includes certain data. Where is a palliative suicide attempt already considered to be an act towards suicide? Where is it actually considered to be death by suicide?

What is the background to it? All of these details of making the statistics play a vital role. The hard numbers, for example here in Switzerland, are that over ten or 20 years, the number of violent suicides have decreased considerably from around 1,300 in total to 1,000. At the same time, the number of assisted deaths has gone up. It is not a question of the one or the other. Many psychiatrists say that a person choosing a procured or accompanied suicide has another background or another motivation. It is another classification that the person choosing assisted dying, legal and professionally supported assisted dying, is a completely different thing. Of course that is true, but the connection is one which we see here at Dignitas. Every day we get emails from all over the world from people who have attempted suicide with violent methods, and who obviously had survived, and in the best case they turn to us so that we can explain to them that violent methods have a huge risk of failure, of damaging their health, and of damaging others, and that it is much better that to go for legal, professionally accompanied methods instead of - I will put this in harsh words - jumping off the Cliffs of Moher. There is the connect between suicide attempt prevention and assisted dying. We could go on from this to the discussion beyond assisted dying, which is that the strength of a society is measured in how it is dealing and treating its weakest, and how we take seriously people who say "I do not want to continue living".

I must point also to an important element, and then I will close. This may sound strange to the committees, but in my 20 years of working with Dignitas I have never seen anyone who wants to die. The people who come to Dignitas do not want to die but they do not want to continue living in a situation that they feel does not match their quality of life from their personal perspective. If we could do something - anything - to improve their quality of life and Professor Boer gave a very good example, then these people would happily continue living. The core thing really is to install a system of maximum freedom of choice and at the same time education for the public and education for the healthcare system and healthcare professionals so they learn how to deal with and how to listen to wishes of people who say "I do not want to continue living " If they are to say anything at all most of the people would say "I want to die" but the biggest problem is that most people do not even say that due to the taboo of suicide, due to fear of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, due to fear of not being taken seriously, and due to fear of being stigmatised and so on. We must change the culture via education in the direction of making the base layer so that people can come forward and whatever the reason may be for them to say "I want to end my own life, I want to die and I want to use suicide", they are being met at eye level and from there on, there is discussion around what is there in terms of solutions towards reinstalling quality of life, to bring them back on track to enjoy life and have a good quality of life, and if that is not possible to make it possible that these people can have a professional way out of their suffering, which is assisted dying.