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Ethics Council members Lob-Hüdepohl, Buyx, Frister: Decision to commit suicide “an expression of the right to self-determination”
Photo: IMAGO/Jürgen Heinrich
The German Ethics Council is convinced that a person's truly free and responsible decision to commit suicide must be respected.
If a person makes the decision to commit suicide voluntarily, this must be accepted "as an expression of the right to self-determination," said Ethics Council Chairwoman Alena Buyx when presenting a statement on the subject on Thursday in Berlin.
The state and society have no right to prevent people from committing suicide.
However, suicide prevention plays an important role.
Because the decision to commit suicide is irreversible, autonomous suicide decisions must satisfy a particularly high degree of self-determination, according to the statement entitled “Suicide – Responsibility, Prevention and Autonomy”.
This presupposes the ability to adequately and realistically evaluate all aspects and to weigh them up against each other.
Disputed in the Ethics Council: Exception for minors?
According to the statement by the Ethics Council, voluntary suicide decisions result mainly from life situations in which the realization of basic needs is massively difficult.
However, the state and society must ensure that even in such situations people do not feel compelled to "prefer death as the supposedly lesser evil to life," said the spokesman for the Council's internal working group, Helmut Frister.
One of the controversial points within the Ethics Council is the question of whether suicide assistance for minors should be permitted in certain exceptional cases - and whether a specific procedure should then be defined.
The experts also disagree about whether there should be the possibility of a so-called advance directive – in the event that the person concerned suffers an illness at a later point in time that makes it impossible to make a self-determined decision.
The experts also dispute the extent to which the obligation to undergo an explanation should be imposed on those who wish to die.
More than 9,000 people took their own lives last year, according to the head of the Ethics Council, Buyx.
The number of attempted suicides and suicidal crises is many times higher.
Buyx pointed out that in 2020 the Federal Constitutional Court overturned the law on the commercial promotion of assisted suicide.
The court underlines the right to self-determined death.
The Bundestag is now discussing a successor plan.
There are three bills that were discussed at first reading in June.
It is still unclear when a decision will be made on this.
According to Buyx, the Ethics Council deliberately refrained from making recommendations for a regulation itself.
Rather, the committee was concerned with creating "appropriate awareness" for the phenomenon of suicide.
has/AFP
