Mr. Silvan Luley:

That is the important point. It is not just people turning to us because they want to have assisted suicide. As I mentioned earlier, many people who sign up see membership of an organisation like Dignitas as having something like an insurance aspect for the future. Signing up does not mean that they want to make use of assisted dying; they might think of it in the future but it does not mean that. Many people have signed up with Dignitas because they support our international human rights work to install freedom of choice over our end-of-life options.

In terms of preparing an assisted death, any member can at any time send us a formal request. This is a letter of request in which they explain their situation and why they want to have an assisted suicide. They have to hand in a curriculum vitae, of course - who is the person? On top of that, they have to provide medical reports which give proof of the suffering of the medical situation. A Swiss medical doctor quite naturally would only agree to writing the prescription for a lethal medication if there is some suffering which a doctor can relate to and where a doctor would say this is sufficient grounds in terms of mental capacity, in terms of suffering, in terms of medical diagnosis, to agree to give hand for an assisted suicide. This is how it works.

As we all know, mental capacity is not something that the individual has to prove by law. This is the case in all jurisdictions in Europe as far as I know; at least in the western hemisphere, mental capacity is something that is assumed. If someone has obvious signs of lacking capacity - if there is a discernment of incapacity of judgment - of course it takes a psychiatric evaluation of mental capacity to determine whether these signs are real, whether there is a lack of capacity which would rule out the person making use of assisted suicide, or whether mental capacity is given.