When someone dies in Switzerland as a result of an Assisted Voluntary Death then a death certificate needs to be issued. For local Swiss residents, this is a simple procedure and rarely takes longer than a few days. For non-Swiss visitors, however, the certificate needs to be in the form of an “International Death Certificate” and will take longer.
Such a delay is not usually problematic. Two weeks seems to be fairly typical but timescales of up to six weeks have recently been experienced. Why ? Well, first, there is more paperwork involved – this is usually needed to prove the identity of the deceased. Second, some of the local Swiss Cantons are currently operating with understaffed Civil Registry Offices.
For UK relatives, this is something of a nuisance but not usually much more than that. For people in the USA, however, it can be more serious.
Some US states are unfamiliar with the whole concept of an “international” death certificate and therefore insist that the US Embassy in Bern must issue something called a “US Consular Statement of Death Of An American Citizen Died Abroad”. In order to do that, the Swiss funeral director will therefore have to undertake the additional task of getting the Swiss certificate sent to the US Embassy for the purpose. The system works perfectly well, but it just takes time.
Occasionally, in America a further problem can be encountered. The Swiss death certificate will never show the cause of death. This is regarded as a matter of medical confidentiality. Some American families, usually driven by the need to make a life insurance claim, have taken lengthy legal steps to get through this barrier of confidentiality – so far, always without success.
In normal circumstances, these procedural hoops would be minor obstacles but nothing more. They do, however, strike families at a particularly sensitive point in their lives – a sensitivity which is not always recognised by the institutions involved.
