a ruleAssisted dying, and who may cross a border for it

Whether assistance in dying is lawful, and whether the person assisted must live there. The second question is the one that makes this a cross-border subject at all, and the rows below record it where the instrument could be read.

Switzerland's position is an omission rather than a permission. Article 115 of the Criminal Code punishes inciting or assisting suicide only where the person acts from a selfish motive. There is no clause about nationality and none about residence, because the article was not written about this at all — it was written about motive. The absence is what the organisations in Zurich and Basel operate in.

Every other permissive regime this project could read has closed that door, and they close it three different ways.

Some write the gate into the statute. Spain's Ley Orgánica 3/2021 requires Spanish nationality, or lawful residence, or twelve months on the municipal register. France's law of 18 August 2026 requires French nationality or stable and regular residence, as one of five cumulative conditions. California requires a driver's licence, a voter registration, a property interest or a tax return.

Canada does it through the health system instead. Section 241.2(1)(a) keys eligibility to entitlement to health services funded by a government in Canada, and forgives only "any applicable minimum period of residence or waiting period". A visitor with no provincial entitlement at all is not saved by that clause.

The Netherlands and Belgium do it through clinical structure. Neither Act contains a nationality or residence clause; the barrier is the due-care regime, which requires a physician to be satisfied of the voluntariness of the request and the hopelessness of the suffering, and a second independent physician to have seen the patient. Inference — that is a relationship, built over time, and it is not something a person acquires by arriving.

One door has opened. Oregon removed its residency requirement in 2023, after a federal suit settled; ORS 127.805 as amended carries no residency language. Inference — which means the common statement that Switzerland is the only jurisdiction admitting non-residents is now, at minimum, incomplete.

The argument this site reports and does not join runs in both directions. A residence gate prevents a state from becoming a destination for something its neighbours prohibit. It also means that a person's access to the option turns on where they happen to be registered, and that the people who travel are the people who can afford to.

Reading a row: the status describes the position for a person who does not live there. A country marked unlawful may still permit the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, which is a different question this table does not record.

What the rows do not carry: the cost of the assistance, the cost of repatriating a body, whether a home state prosecutes a relative who accompanied the person, and what a death certificate issued abroad says. The last of those is the one that reaches the family.

As of 17 September 2026 eight rows below rest on an instrument that was read. Seventeen say no-data, most of them because an official statute site refused the connection on this pass. A no-data row here means this project did not read the law, not that the law is unclear.