The euthanasia or assisted suicide debate has resurfaced again as a suicide device that can be controlled by blinking has recently passed legal reviews in Switzerland.

The machine can be operated from the inside -conceivably just by blinking if the person suffers from locked-in syndrome - and works by reducing the oxygen level in the pod to below a critical level. A Swiss company totally wants to take control away from the physicians in terms of assisted suicide and allow patients to kill themselves at the push of a button.

Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) reports that Exit International, a nonprofit dedicated to assisted suicide advocacy, has developed a 3D-printed suicide chamber dubbed Sarco. The capsule just recently cleared legal regulatory approval in Switzerland, and is set to launch in the country as soon as next year, SBC added.

That would pss muster with a key provision of Swiss law on euthanasia: active euthanasia is illegal in Switzerland, but supplying the means for committing suicide are legal, as long as the action which directly causes death is performed by the one wishing to die.

Sarco allows patients to lay comfortably inside. When they're ready to die, they press a button that fills the chamber with nitrogen gas, resulting in what the nonprofit says will be a painless death via oxygen deprivation with 30 seconds.

"There is no panic, no choking feeling," Dr. Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International, told the SBC. The chamber also allows patients to choose where they might want to die as they can be transported to different locations, like a beach, forest, or their own home.

Although the debates regarding assisted suicide date bac decades, this development introduced a new chapter- the concept of de-medicalising the suicide process. For now in Switzerland, one needs to have a doctor confirm their mental capacity to take the decision and then prescribe them liquid sodium pentobarbital, a drug that can kill you in two to five minutes.

Sarco's creators want to create an AI-powered online mental capacity test. If you "pass," it gives you a code allowing you to access Sarco. However, that's still in the conceptual stages.

"We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves," Dr Nitschke told the broadcaster.

Views on euthanasia

Assisted suicide or euthanasia is one of the most controversial issues in the world, dividing societies, communities and even families. People will have strong opinions on Sarco, but the writer believes it'll give people a new option to go out on their own terms, which is novel.

Article 32 of the Constitution of Bangladesh gives a person the right to life. But why can't the right to live with dignity and the right to end one's own life in dignity in certain situations (e.g. when illness is terminal and prolonging life can only prolong suffering) be interpreted as part of the right to life?

The outdated Section 309 of Bangladesh's Penal Code, Colonial hangover, makes attempt to suicide a criminal offense, contradicts that interpretation of Article 32. A suicide survivor needs counselling if anything, not lock up.

In recent decades, a raft of very progressive jurisdictions in the West, Latin America and Australia have taken the step of allowing terminally ill people the choice of an assisted death.

Terminally ill people should have the choice of an assisted death and the law should not criminalise people who accompany those who make rational decisions to end their sufferings.

To deny this right is to prolong the suffering for individuals and families, something which must be condemned. The system cannot simply make people with great physical and/or mental suffering continue to endure their suffering against their wishes.

Allowing people to end their suffers is not only morally justified, it is also an essential also essential in upholding the right to personal and bodily autonomy. Campaigners for euthanasia have argued that giving dying people the opportunity to choose when and how they die allows them to take control of their life and allow them to go down with dignity.