Former Justice Senator of Hamburg, Roger Kusch addresses a press conference in June 2008. The German upper house discussed on Friday tightening laws on assisted suicide after a former politician caused outrage by helping an elderly woman to die — and filming her final moments.(AFP/DDP/File/Roland Magunia)
BERLIN (AFP) - The German upper house discussed on Friday tightening laws on assisted suicide after a former politician caused outrage by helping an elderly woman to die — and filming her final moments.
Roger Kusch, an ex-senator in Hamburg and a right-to-die campaigner, advised Bettina Schart on how to prepare a deadly cocktail of drugs which the 79-year-old then took last Saturday after he had left her apartment.
Schart was not suffering from any life-threatening illness. The childless woman felt lonely and did not wish to end her days in a nursing home. She procured the drugs herself.
Kusch, a lawyer by profession, made sure he did nothing illegal by filming several hours of conversations and leaving the camera running while she took the lethal mixture in order to prove that he did not administer it himself.
Several days later Kusch appeared before the press and played clips of the his conversations with Schart, causing outrage in a country still haunted by memories of the euthanasia practices of the Nazis.
Bavaria’s Justice Minister Beate Merk called the episode “sick and inhumane” while Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe, head of Germany’s doctors’ federation, branded Kusch an “arrogant cynic.”
Helping someone to kill themselves is not illegal in Germany as long as someone does not physically help the person to end his life.
Under the new legislation to be debated, it will become illegal for any organisation, commercial or otherwise, to help someone kill themselves or even to give them advice on how to do so.
The fact that the bill was tabled on Friday was not because of the Kusch case but it has helped to prompt a lively and timely debate in the German media.
It is unclear whether Kusch will find himself on the wrong side of the law if the changes hit the statute books and he repeats his actions with someone else who wants to die.
He is head of an organisation that campaigns for the right to die but he insists that he carried out his actions with Schart in his personal capacity, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said.