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Suicide tourism

practice of people travelling to a specific jurisdiction to kill themselves

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ4445647 ↗
Source-derived summary

Suicide tourism, or euthanasia tourism, is the practice of potential suicide candidates travelling to a jurisdiction to die by suicide or assisted suicide which is legal in some jurisdictions, or the practice of travelling to a jurisdiction in order to obtain drugs that can aid in the process of ending one's own life.

Status in various countries

Cambodia

An American expatriate who set up websites offering to help people make arrangements to kill themselves in Cambodia shut the sites down in 2005, saying he hoped to avoid problems with the authorities.

Mexico

A drug known as liquid pentobarbital, which is used by owners to euthanize pets, can give a person a painless death in under one hour. Due to the drug's availability at pet shops, tourists seeking to end their lives were reported to be flying from around the world to Mexico.

Netherlands

Critics have claimed that the Dutch initiative for euthanasia will trigger a wave of "euthanasia tourism". However, a clause insisting on a well-established relationship between doctor and patient is designed to prevent this.

Switzerland

Regulations were proposed to limit possibilities of legal suicide assistance for foreigners in Switzerland. The law primarily targeted Dignitas, the sole organization offering assisted suicide to non-resident foreign nationals. The Swiss government rejected proposed stricter regulations in 2006, maintaining the status quo as regulated by Paragraph 115 of Swiss Criminal Code.

As of 2008, 60% of all suicides assisted by the organisation Dignitas had been Germans, and between 1998 and 2018 around 1,250 German citizens (almost three times the number of any other nationality) travelled to Dignitas in Zürich, for an assisted suicide.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Suicide tourism” as practice of people travelling to a specific jurisdiction to kill themselves. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Suicide, tourism and practice.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2005, 2006, 2008, 1998—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Suicide, tourism and practice providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Suicide tourism”, the useful work is to connect “practice of people travelling to a specific jurisdiction to kill themselves” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4445647. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2006, 2008 and 1998.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Suicide tourism”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Suicide tourism primary sources, Suicide tourism archive and Suicide research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Suicide tourism”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Suicide tourism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.