Europe

20 things you might not know about assisted suicide in Europe

Peter Saunders | 16 June 2011

The Sunday Times, in line with its new editorial policy, ran a typically effusive article last weekend about last night’s ‘documentary’ in which we saw a British man, Peter Smedley, kill himself on screen by drinking poison at the Dignitas suicide facility near Zurich. Earlier this year I suggested that the BBC was acting in the role of cheerleader for assisted suicide through its partisan coverage of this issue; and I blogged earlier about how this particular programme was further evidence of BBC bias and would fuel more suicides by way of the Werther effect. But I was also interested to see Mr Pratchett’s (brief) description in the Sunday Times about how the documentary came to be made in the first place. ‘Late last year the BBC, which had earlier transmitted my Dimbleby lecture on assisted dying, asked me to "learn something about assisted dying practices elsewhere in Europe" and also to speak to Britons who had signed up with Dignitas… Of course I said yes.’ Here are twenty things the programme did not tell us about assisted suicide and euthanasia in Europe: