(Oregon Right to Life) — The founder of a “pioneering” assisted suicide organization passed away late last month, ending his own life with “professional support” at one of his own clinics.
Dignitas founder Ludwig A. Minelli, 92, passed away on November 29, 2025, “self-determinedly by voluntary assisted dying,” according to a press release put out by his organization. No other details about Minelli’s death were released.
Born December 5, 1932, in Zurich, Switzerland, Minelli began his career as a journalist in 1956. “Fascinated by the legal means through which the fundamental rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights could be enforced beyond national borders,” the press release notes, Menelli began studying law in 1977, founding the “Swiss Society for the European Convention on Human Rights” the same year.
In 1998, after working as a legal advisor to EXIT (a Swiss assisted suicide organization and the oldest such organization in the world), he founded “DIGNITAS, To live with dignity – To die with dignity.”
According to its website, Dignitas aids individuals who have been determined to be “of sound judgment” and in possession of “a minimum level of physical mobility (sufficient to self-administer the drug)” in legally committing suicide by ingesting lethal drugs if they meet one of three potential criteria: They must have “a disease which will lead to death (terminal illness),” be suffering from “an unendurable incapacitating disability,” or be experiencing “unbearable and uncontrollable pain.”
The Associated Press reported that Dignitas has assisted over 4,200 suicides since the organization’s founding in 1998, citing the group’s 2024 statement. Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1942.
Pro-life advocates and human rights proponents worldwide have expressed strong opposition to the legalization of assisted suicide in nations throughout the world – including Canada and numerous states in America – noting that it is opposed to the dignity and sanctity of human life, leads from an alleged “right to die” to an implicit “duty to die,” and unnecessarily opens avenues for coercion, manipulation, and abuse.
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Alliance VITA, a French organization founded to raise “awareness among policymakers and the public to protect human life,” argued in a 2023 report that the law in Switzerland permitting assisted suicide is “both vague and flexible,” adding that “the number of assisted suicides is ever increasing, and the abuse is multiplying in several forms.”
Despite the controversial nature of assisted suicide, Dignitas vowed in its press release that it would continue its founder’s work following his passing.
“The Dignitas team will continue to manage and develop the association in the spirit of its founder as a professional and combative international organization for self-determination and freedom of choice in life and at the end of life,” Dignitas said.
In an article published December 3, National Right to Life Outreach & Events Director Raimundo Rojas responded to news of Minelli’s death by denouncing his assisted suicide mission.
“We oppose his message with all our strength,” Rojas wrote. “We declare unashamedly that no one is better off dead… We will not stay silent. We will not compromise. We will never accept the lie that killing is kindness. We will stand and shout the truth until our voices fail: every life is worth fighting for, every suffering person deserves love, and no human being should ever be discarded.”
RELATED: American Medical Association Reaffirms Opposition to Assisted Suicide
Assisted suicide is currently legal in numerous European countries, as well as Canada, eleven U.S. states, and Washington, D.C.
Oregon was the first state in the nation to legalize physician-assisted suicide under the euphemistically titled “Death With Dignity Act,” which was passed in 1994 and took effect in 1997. The law allows physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to patients diagnosed with a terminal illness and given six months or fewer to live. In 2023, Democratic Governor Tina Kotek signed a law stripping away the DWDA’s residency requirement, thereby allowing Oregon physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to people who travel to Oregon from other states. The rate of assisted suicide prescriptions has increased over time, with a 30% jump in 2023 followed by an 8% increase in 2024. Last year, assisted suicides made up about one in every 100 deaths statewide.
Raising additional concerns for pro-life advocates, loopholes in Oregon’s DWDA criteria have reportedly allowed physicians to prescribe death-inducing drugs to patients for a broad swath of reasons, including diabetes, arthritis, and even anorexia.
