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Email: "Canadian Private Member’s Motion Would Make Internet Counselling for Suicide a Criminal Offense"

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BY LifeSiteNews.com By Hilary White OTTAWA, May 28, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Conservative MP from Kitchener, Ontario has proposed a private member’s motion that would make it a criminal offense to use the internet to counsel a person to commit suicide. The Motion follows the well-publicized case of Nadia Kajouji, the 18 year-old Carleton University student who committed suicide in 2008 after allegedly being coaxed to do so in an internet chat room.M-388, tabled in the House of Commons on May 26th by Kitchener MP Harold Albrecht, proposes that the government should ensure that counseling, aiding or abetting a person to commit suicide is a Criminal Code offence “regardless of the means used to counsel or aid or abet including via telecommunications, the Internet or a computer system.” Alex Schadenberg, said that Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) welcomed the Motion and told LifeSiteNews.com that there are serious concerns that people who suffer from depression could become victims of “suicide predators” who use the internet. Schadenberg, executive director of the EPC, said the Kajouji case illustrates “how the law needs to be clarified in order to ensure that justice is served.”Kajouji, a seriously depressed young woman from Brampton, Ontario, jumped into the freezing Rideau River in early March 2008. It was later revealed that she had been in conversation in an internet chat group with a Minnesota man who had been posing as a teenage girl. The man had allegedly urged Kajouji to commit suicide and promised he would die with her. The Minnesota Internet Crimes Against Children task force is investigating the involvement of William Melchert-Dinkel, a 47-year-old nurse and father living in Faribault, Minnesota. An affidavit submitted by investigators to a U.S. court said that Melchert-Dinkel had used different aliases in chat-rooms and admitted to police that he coaxed at least five different people to commit suicide using the internet. Kajouji’s brother Marc told media that his sister’s suicide could have been prevented, and believed that the internet conversations were the decisive factor in her death. “It just shows you the kind of world that's out there on the Internet. That conversation wouldn't have taken place in person,” he said.Schadenberg said, “Suicide predators take advantage of chat-rooms or internet sites to encourage suicide. The twisted thinking of a suicide predator can only be stopped by the law ensuring that suicide predators can be convicted of assisted suicide.”The law could affect pro-assisted suicide organizations that maintain websites, give interviews and post videos and instructional books to the internet that promote their pro-suicide philosophy. The Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization (ERGO), formerly known by the name the Hemlock Society, maintains a website that includes links to sites where a reader can purchase the notorious suicide instruction manual Final Exit, including electronic and DVD versions. ERGO’s suicide manifesto is also posted to the website and says, “Every competent adult has the incontestable right to humankind’s ultimate civil and personal liberty—the right to die in a manner and at a time of their own choosing.”The Switzerland-based organization Dignitas also maintains a website which publicizes the lobbying efforts of its founder, Ludwig Minelli. Minelli has advocated that assisted suicide be made legal everywhere for anyone who wants to die, including those who do not suffer from any terminal illness, including the severely depressed. Dignitas has admitted to having helped to kill at least 54 British people and uncounted others from around Europe.Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:Swiss Euthanasia Group Demands Assisted Suicide for the Depressed http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/06092204.html http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-private-members-motion-would-make-internet-counselling-for-suicide/

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