Three leading Belgian academics have argued that the country’s euthanasia law is so unfit for purpose that it is effectively broken beyond repair.
The study, ‘Euthanasia in Belgium: Shortcomings of the Law and Its Application and Monitoring of Practice’, by Kasper Raus, Bert Vanderhaegen and Sigrid Sterckx of Ghent University, is published in the February issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
Belgium enacted its first euthanasia laws in 2002, which have since been hailed as models for assisted-dying reform around the world. Its position was followed by Canada in 2016, and Portugal and Spain are reportedly set to embrace it too.
The law originally required the patient to be an adult, clearly able to express their wish to die, with that request being made voluntarily and repeatedly, without pressure and in writing, and discussed with two medical practitioners. Ideally, that patient should be in constant, unbearable physical or mental pain. In 2002, 24 deaths were accounted to euthanasia. By 2019, that figure had risen over a hundredfold, to 2,656, representing over 2% of all deaths recorded in Belgium that year.
Unreliable statistics
Furthermore, the study’s authors claim that only 60% of incidents of assisted dying are published, because Belgium’s system relies on self-reporting cases of euthanasia. They claim this is deficient because ‘several legal requirements intended to operate as safeguards and procedural guarantees in reality often fail to operate as such’.
They point the finger of blame at the body responsible for overseeing doctors’ compliance with the law, the Federal Control and Evaluation Commission for Euthanasia. It is, they believe, either ineffective or possibly even complicit in a pro-euthanasia and assisted-suicide agenda. They draw on 20 years of academic research to produce a compelling case against them, concluding: ‘We believe [the position in Belgium] is ethically and legally problematic and should be of concern to everyone, regardless of their stance on the ethical justifiability of euthanasia in general.’
Rebekah Moffett of Christian Concern commented: ‘Euthanasia in the UK is illegal, but we are still seeing an increasing number of people referred to the Court of Protection, being condemned to death by stealth – all because their lives are deemed “not worthy of protection”. We can’t afford to open the door to euthanasia any wider unless we want to see a Belgian system running our government policy.’
