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N u m b e r 154 September 2014

The National Post reported on August 8 that Minnesota prosecutors are seeking to once again convict William Mel-chert-Dinkel, a former nurse with an obsession with suicide voyeurism, with assisted suicide in the death of Canadian teenager, Nadia Kajouji. The article stated:

“Prosecutors argued that a former nurse should be convicted of assisting suicide for sending emails and other online communications in which he urged two people in Canada and Britain to kill themselves and gave them information on how to do it.Melchert-Dinkel, was back in court more than three

years after he was convicted of encouraging suicides in the deaths of Nadia Kajouji, 18, of Brampton, ON., in 2008 and Mark Drybrough, 32, of Coventry, England, in 2005.”

Melchert-Dinkel’s previous conviction was overturned by the Minnesota Supreme Court, earlier this year, after they ruled that the definition of encouraging or advis-ing suicide was too broad and restricted his “freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court ruling upheld the assisted suicide law. Minnesota prosecutors argued that Melchert-Dinkel contravened the law. The article stated that:

“Evidence at that trial showed Melchert-Dinkel was obsessed with suicide and sought out depressed people online, posing as a suicidal female nurse, faking com-passion and offering detailed instructions on how they could kill themselves. Police said he told them he did it for “the thrill of the chase,” and allegedly wanted to watch his targets die via a computer webcam.

According to court documents, he acknowledged par-ticipating in online chats about suicide with up to 20 people and entering into fake suicide pacts with about 10, five of whom he believed killed themselves.His online pseudonyms included “Falcon Girl” and

“Cami D.” The defense acknowledged the charges but claim that his

acts are protected by “freedom of speech.”

Melchert-Dinkel encouraged people at their most vul-nerable time to commit suicide. He acted like a friend using a false name and he gave them instructions for suicide and encouraged them to do the act in front of a webcam. Mel-chert-Dinkel should be prosecuted.

US Prosecutors seek new conviction in assisted suicide death of Canadian teen

The EPC National Symposium will be held on Saturday October 4 (9 am – 5 pm) at the Best West-ern Ottawa - Gatineau Hotel and Conference Centre. The location is directly across from Parliament Hill, across the bridge from the National Art Gallery and beside the Canadian Museum of History.

The theme this year is: Uniting To Stop Euthanasia.

The Symposium will focus on what we can do to stop

euthanasia in Québec and Canada, while creating a greater unified focus with people with disabilities and healthcare professionals.

The location will enable you to have a couple of days in the Ottawa area, walking distance to Parliament Hill and other national tourist locations.

Registration for the National Symposium is $99 regular or $79 for students and people with disabilities.

Book a room at the Best Western for $120 per night at: 1-800-265-8550.

National Symposium – October 4 – Ottawa – Gatineau

Nadia Kajouji

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Newsletter – 154 – September 20142

The Canada Health Network reported that the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), at their annual general meeting, maintained their policy oppos-ing euthanasia and assisted sui-cide when voting on the eutha-nasia conscience motion. The motion protected:

“the right of all physicians, within the bonds of exist-ing legislation, to follow their conscience when decid-ing whether to provide so-called medical aid in dying.”

The resolution means that if the euthanasia legislation in Québec is put into place, physicians in Québec can decide to kill or not to kill, but where euthanasia and assisted sui-cide is illegal, doctors must follow the law.

A Canadian Press article stated that there was a signifi-cant debate at the CMA meeting. The article quoted the Past President of the CMA, Dr John Haggie, as saying:

“The driver for this discussion is a desperate lack of palliative-care services,” John Haggie, a Newfound-land physician, told the conference. “We don’t have a hospice in the province anywhere.”

Haggie responded with an “unequivocal no” to a ques-tion posed by the CMA to its members on whether their patients have access to adequate palliative care.

At the release of the Parliamentary Committee on Pallia-tive and Compassionate Care report (November 18, 2011) Dr. Haggie, who was the President of the CMA, (at that time) told the media:

“requests for euthanasia usually reflect a failure to ac-cess adequate palliative care.”

Haggie then called on the Federal government to institute a national palliative care strategy. On May 28, 2014 Motion

456, concerning a national palliative care strategy, received near unanimous support in Canada’s parliament.

On June 5, 2014, the Québec National Assembly passed Bill 52, a bill that legalizes euthanasia in Québec. Bill 52 defines euthanasia as “medical treatment.”

The Physicians Alliance for the Total Refusal of Eutha-nasia and Vivre dans la Dignité in Québec launched a legal challenge to Bill 52 on July 17, 2014. The legal challenge to the Québec euthanasia law states that Bill 52 is unconstitu-tional since the Québec government cannot legalize eutha-nasia, which is prohibited by the federal criminal code. The legal challenge also says that:

“the impugned provisions, of Bill 52, unjustifiably in-fringe the rights to life and to security of patients guar-anteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Free-doms and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. They further infringe the right to the safe-guard of the dignity of the person, which is also pro-tected by the Quebec Charter.”

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition will intervene in the case in the Québec court.

A recent survey of 4800 members of the Canadian Med-ical Association (CMA) found that 36.3% supported the legalization of euthanasia and 44.8% physician-assisted suicide.

Even after the Canadian media has pushed for the legal-ization of euthanasia and assisted suicide, the majority of physicians remain opposed to intentionally causing the death of their patients.

The Canadian Medical Association votes on euthanasia resolution

A recent article by Professor Theo Boer, a Dutch ethicist who has been a member of a euthanasia monitoring com-mittee in the Netherlands for 9 years, warned the rest of the world to not legalize assisted suicide or euthanasia.

An article published by DutchNews.nl explains that a euthanasia clinic was reprimanded for the death of an elderly woman, who had a stroke and died by euthanasia because she didn’t want to live in a nursing home. The article stated:

“The euthanasia monitoring committee said the clin-ic’s experts had failed to exercise proper care when carrying out their duties. The public prosecution de-partment is now investigating the case,” Trouw report-ed on Wednesday.

In his article, Boer wrote that he had supported the Dutch euthanasia law, but after 12 years experience, he changed his mind based on the uncontrollable expansion of reasons for euthanasia:

See Theo Boer page 3 ...

Dutch euthanasia clinic lethally injects elderly woman

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Newsletter – 154 – September 2014 3

Not Dead Yet – UK campaign against assisted suicide billBy: Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick, Not Dead Yet – UK, edited for length from its original by EPC.

In the British House of Lords, another attempt to legalise assisted suicide/eutha-nasia was debated on July 18 through Lord Falconer’s ‘as-sisted dying’ Bill.

The Not Dead Yet personal letter-writing/email campaign had a real effect. This reinfor-ces that deeply felt personal belief that letters from people with disabilities potentially outweighs numerous letters from our opposition; espe-cially if that letter expresses truths, exposes the dissembling of those who favour as-sisted suicide.

Our hope and expectation is that the Lords will kill the Bill at the committee stage this fall. We have hope, but we will not rely on that hope alone to defeat the Bill.

We had some significant success in the British media, most notably a complete u-turn in a major daily, the Guard-ian, whose editorial appeared on the morning of the de-bate, in time for it to be cited by some of the Lords in their speeches. The phrase ‘this would change the moral land-scape’ was repeated more than once.

There were many significant media ‘hits’ during the week which changed the balance in a way we had not ex-perienced before.

Baroness Jane Campbell spoke on BBC Radio 4’s flag-ship Today programme. Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson spoke to BBC1’s This Week about the reaction from some people to her disability, and how: “In their eyes, my life is not worth living.”

The ITV’s flagship programme Tonight, featured ter-minally ill people for and against the proposed law and had selections from a debate filmed earlier, in which I partici-pated. The editor gave everyone fair time.

It was the Guardian editorial that morning which stunned us all. One of Britain’s biggest daily newspapers, has con-sistently been pro-assisted suicide. The morning of the de-bate, it published an editorial which was an extraordinary u-turn using the headline Lord Falconer’s bill sounds mod-est but it will redraw the moral landscape.

That evening I did a Radio 5 Live national interview against Tom Curran of Exit and a Scottish GP Dr Kerr who had euthanized patients. On our side, Roger Symes plugged away. The interviewing journalist Stephen Nolan gave me the last contribution which lasted more than five minutes answering his questions.

Liz Carr set up a special interest forum page on Face-book, which became a focal point for disabled people and supporters to check, and refine their ideas, and it was a use-ful tool for communicating the details of the protest.

We decided on several messages among them: “Kill the Bill, not us’ as the banner shows.”

The Twitter ‘thunderclap’ which went off just one minute after the assisted suicide lobby’s, apparently reached over 200,000 people.

Twitter and Facebook have been effective means of com-municating, especially with disabled colleagues in the US, alongside others of course.

We are working as though the assisted suicide bill will return to the Commons sometime after the next election, beginning mid-2015.

We are building on any gains made in the last while. That means we are trying to continue to educate our vari-ous audiences. Politicians and journalists are the key.

“Whereas in the first years after 2002 hardly any pa-tients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering of those given euthanasia or assisted suicide consisted in being aged, lonely or bereaved. Some of these patients could have lived for years or decades.”Boer concludes his article by urging the world not to

legalize euthanasia because:

“Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely to ever go back in again.”Whether the public prosecution de-

partment deems this euthanasia death to be acceptable or not, the woman is dead, the supposed “safeguards” didn’t protect her, and the euthanasia clinic decided that death was preferable to liv-ing with the affects of a stroke.

...Theo Boer from page 2

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Conference Against Assisted Suicide - November 22, 2014The East Coast Conference Against Assisted Suicide is

being held on Saturday November 22, 2014 Double Tree Hotel in Windsor Locks, Connecticut near the Bradley International Airport.

This conference will be a unifying and educational ef-fort by leaders and groups that opposed the assisted suicide bills in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

There will also be a leaders’ planning meeting at the same location on Friday November 21.

To register go to this website: http://assistedsuicideconference.eventzilla.net

Contact us at: info@epcc.ca or 1-877-439-3348

A recent journal article concerning a pilot study on as-sisted suicide in Switzerland resulted in more media pro-motion of assisted suicide. Assisted suicide causes the death of people and the issue deserves further investigation concerning its actual practice in Switzerland.

In April 2013, Pietro D’Amico, a 62-year-old magistrate from Calabria in southern Italy died by assisted suicide at Dignitas. An article that was published in Switzerland’s, The Local, stated:

“The father-of-one made the decision after a wrong di-agnosis from Italian and Swiss doctors.” The family lawyer Michele Roccisano told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “An autopsy carried out by the University of Basel’s

Institute of Forensic Medicine found that D’Amico was not suffering from a life-threatening illness at the time of his death.”

In February, 2014 the Daily Mail reported that: “Oriella Cazzanello, 85, travelled to the Dignitas

suicide clinic in Basel, Switzerland, where she paid €10,000 for an assisted suicide because was unhappy about losing her looks.Cazzanello, who was in good mental and physical

health, left her home in Arzignano, near Vicenza in northern Italy, without telling her relatives where she was going. Her family, who had reported her to the po-lice as missing, only learnt of her death after they re-ceived her ashes and death certificate from the clinic.”

In July 2013, a Swiss regional court found Dr. Philippe Freiburghaus “crossed the line” by assisting a suicide with-out obtaining a diagnosis.

On April 23, 2014, Dr Freiburghaus was acquitted for assisting a suicide without a diagnosis. The reasons for the acquittal were not made public.

An 89-year-old British woman died by assisted suicide in Switzerland because she felt alienated from the modern world.

In May 2013, the European Court of Human Rights said that Switzerland did not provide clear enough guidelines on who could obtain lethal drugs.

A study published in the Journal of Epidemiology exam-ined 1301 assisted suicide deaths in Switzerland and found that:

“…around 16 per cent of death certificates did not register an underlying cause. In other words, they had no underlying illness.”

A previous study of suicides by two right-to-die organ-izations showed that 25 per cent of those assisted had no fatal illness, instead citing ‘weariness of life’ as a factor.

Recently a Swiss assisted suicide group decided to ex-tend suicide assistance to healthy elderly people who are living with some form of physical or psychological pain.

The most recent study titled: “Suicide tourism: a pilot study on the Swiss phenomenon” examines the assisted suicide deaths of foreign people who died at the Dignitas suicide clinic.

This study promotes the legalization of assisted suicide in countries where suicide tourists most often originate from. Study admits that Switzerland lacks any effective controls of its suicide business and it acknowledges that there is an increasing number of deaths by non-terminal people.

Switzerland, Assisted Suicide and Death Clinics