Former Northern Territory resident Dr Philip Nitschke has said his new assisted suicide capsule, the Sarco machine, has been given legal approval for use in Switzerland, and he said he wants to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish a person’s mental capacity for assisted suicide.

Dr Nitschke, who operates Exit International, told Swissinfo about what was described as the coffin-like 3-D printed Sarco capsule that is operated from the inside by the person who is going to die.

“The person will get into the capsule and lie down. It’s very comfortable. They will be asked a number of questions and when they have answered, they may press the button inside the capsule activating the mechanism in their own time,” he told the media outlet.

“The capsule is sitting on a piece of equipment that will flood the interior with nitrogen, rapidly reducing the oxygen level to 1 per cent from 21 per cent. The person will feel a little disoriented and may feel slightly euphoric before they lose consciousness.

“The whole thing takes about 30 seconds. Death takes place through hypoxia and hypocapnia, oxygen and carbon dioxide deprivation, respectively. There is no panic, no choking feeling.”

Dr Nitschke said the capsule passed a “legal review” in Switzerland and could now be used there. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, meaning a person can kill themselves, but euthanasia is illegal, meaning a person cannot be killed by someone else, even if it is voluntary.

He said there were two Sarco prototypes, one on display at the Museum for Sepulchral Culture in Kassel, Germany from September to February 2022, while the second was “not aesthetically pleasing” and was not being used.

A third one is being printed in the Netherlands and should be ready for use in Switzerland in 2022, Dr Nitschke said.

He said currently a doctor needed to prescribe the sodium pentobarbital and to confirm the person’s mental capacity to undertake euthanasia but he wanted to de-medicalise the process.

“Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally there is a lot of scepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists. But our original conceptual idea is that the person would do an online test and receive a code to access the Sarco,” he said.

Dr Nitschke moved to the Northern Territory in the early 1970s and became a park ranger, but studied medicine at the University of Sydney after a serious injury, graduating in 1988 before returning to the Territory to work as a doctor.

The Exit International biography on Dr Nitschke said in 1996 he became the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, lethal voluntary injection under the short-lived Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (NT).

The law was overturned by federal politician Kevin Andrews who put forward a private members bill, the Euthanasia Laws Act of March 2017 made it illegal for the Northern Territory Government to make laws on euthanasia.

in 1997 Dr Nitschke founded the Voluntary Euthanasia Research Foundation which is now called Exit International and moved to Europe in 2016.

A new Territory Rights Bill, pushed by CLP Senator Sam McMahon that would overturn the Andrews bill and restore assisted-dying rights to the NT, was debated in Parliament last week. It was conditionally supported by Labor and the Greens, but has yet to be passed.

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