For 16 years, Belgium has allowed euthanasia not only for patients with terminal illnesses such as cancer, but also for those with psychiatric ailments found to be incurable and causing "unbearable" suffering. To critics who suggested that this was asking for trouble--that the diagnosis of psychiatric illness is unavoidably subjective, and that psychiatric patients are inherently less capable of informed consent--Belgian medical authorities and much of Belgian society had a ready answer: Don't worry. There are procedures to prevent anything from going wrong.
Now comes the strongest evidence yet that all is not well with Belgium's system of euthanasia for those with mental illness.
A court in Flanders has decided to authorize criminal charges against two doctors who facilitated the euthanasia of 38-year-old Tine Nys in 2010, based on a diagnosis that she was suffering unbearably from an incurable condition, autism, and a third physician who actually carried out the lethal injection.
If the trial goes forward, and if the doctors are convicted on the specific allegation, "poisoning," the punishment could be life in prison. One of the accused doctors is Lieve Thienpont, a psychiatrist who has been the country's leading advocate of euthanasia for those with mental illnesses, and has supervised many herself.
The indictment is by no means a vindication, however belated, of the supposed checks and balances in the Belgian euthanasia system.
Nys' family said that not only was the autism diagnosis dubious--they insisted she was depressed over a recent breakup with her boyfriend--but her passing was not a "death with dignity."
Yet at the time, the Federal Commission for Euthanasia Control and Evaluation, Belgium's top regulatory body for such cases and the main institutional safeguard, found that everything had been done properly.
Asked on a recent Belgian TV program how it could be that the regulatory commission signed off on what a court regards as at least a possible crime, Wim Distelmans, the panel's chairman, responded: "The committee only checks whether the basic conditions and procedural conditions have been met. If documents show that this is the case, then we have no reason to doubt. We do not judge the professional competence of the psychiatrist or the doctor. It is not for us to judge about that."
Perhaps these developments signal that Belgium is having second thoughts about euthanizing so many troubled people who are not actually terminally ill.
Editorial on 12/01/2018