September 15, 2026
Assisted dying campaigner plans ‘Swiss pop-up advice office’ in UK
Philip Nitschke, an Australian former GP, said many Britons had lost confidence that assisted dying would ever be legal in Britain reports Sanchez Manning, Social Affairs Correspondent
A right to die campaigner says he plans to open a “pop-up office” in London to advise Britons on going to Switzerland for assisted suicide.
Philip Nitschke, founder of the pro-euthanasia organisation Exit International, said he had begun exploring the possibility in response to the high level of interest in Athanasios, a Swiss assisted dying clinic set up last year.
Carlos Cabrera, the founder of the clinic, gave a presentation at a workshop hosted by Nitschke, an Australian former GP, in the UK capital this month.
Cabrera claimed to have been questioned for almost an hour by members of the audience, which was said to number more than 100.
Nitschke argued that interest in Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, had risen among many Britons because they had lost confidence that assisted dying would ever be permitted in the UK.
Last week MPs voted against the assisted dying bill, which would have allowed terminally ill people to end their lives.
The legislation was defeated on Friday by a margin of 16 votes, with 286 MPs against and 270 for, meaning assisted suicide will remain illegal in the UK for the foreseeable future.
Nitschke told The Times: “Carlos was so surprised by the large number of questions. He wasn’t expecting that.
“I told him a lot of the interest is probably driven by the fact that there’s no law yet on assisted suicide in the UK. But he said either way, there’s so much interest.
“That’s when I suggested to him that we could set up an office in London representing Athanasios or as a more general Swiss referral service.”
The number of Britons travelling to Switzerland for assisted deaths has grown steadily over the past decade, although it remains low overall.
There were 43 recorded as dying at the Dignitas clinic near Zurich last year, the second highest annual figure on record.
According to analysis of data from all Swiss assisted suicide centres by the campaign group My Death, My Decision, at least one British citizen travels to Switzerland each week for an assisted death.
Athanasios was established in March last year by Cabrera, who was a senior nurse at Pegasos, another assisted dying clinic in Switzerland where Wendy Duffy, a British woman, ended her life after the death of her only child.
Wendy Duffy died in April
The [new] centre has been reported to operate from a house in Allschwil, a suburb of Basel.
Applicants to the clinic do not have to be physically ill to be granted an assisted death. They simply must be over 18 and prove they have the mental capacity to decide to die.
Cabrera previously told the Daily Mail that between 40 and 60 British people had already died by assisted suicide at Athanasios.
During the workshop in London, he was questioned about many aspects of his clinic’s practice, including the issue of mental capacity.
A number of those attending were interested in how Athanasios handled applications from people with dementia.
Cabrera confirmed that the centre did accept people in the first stage of dementia, but said that such patients underwent mental capacity assessment by a psychiatrist before being allowed to die.
One person in the audience asked: “To have your mental capacity means we have to see a psychiatrist in Switzerland?”
Cabrera replied: “Yes it does, because we have to give our psychiatric report to the police and declare you have the mental capacity to make the decision.”
He confirmed that applicants were charged 9,500 Swiss francs, or about £8,600, of which 100 francs must be paid upfront.
Explaining the clinic’s methodology, Cabrera said that rather than giving patients a lethal substance to drink, as Dignitas does, his centre delivers it intravenously.
Nitschke revealed that he had already been considering locations for a UK office.
“There is so much interest, it would be a pretty useful thing to have in London,” he said. “It will basically be a place where people can go and speak English to someone because, often, people have trouble trying to organise everything on the internet with the organisations in Switzerland.”
On the matter of whether such an advice service would be able to operate legally in UK, Nitschke took the opportunity to challenge the British authorities.
“If you’ve got a lot of your population seeking information about assisted dying, then to try and use some form of censorship to try and stop people getting that information reflects pretty badly on any administration that would do that,” he said.
“This would be a good test to see what would actually happen.”
Nitschke was condemned by Alistair Thompson of Care not Killing, which campaigns against euthanasia and assisted suicide.
“These are appalling comments,” he said. “There is no great demand for assisted suicide in this country, which I am sure will come as a great disappointment for this man.”
