Belgian Constitutional Court makes it easier to kill by euthanasia.

This article was published by the National Review on October 21, 2022.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

The headline on this Brussels Times story is says much less than it seems to: “Constitutional Court Voids Belgium’s Euthanasia Law.” 

Alas, the story about the ruling seems to indicate that the problem with the law was that it was too strictly written, rather than being a violation of fundamental rights.

In a remarkable ruling, Belgium’s Constitutional Court has declared the country’s euthanasia law to be unconstitutional and will therefore need to be modified.

The ruling does not imply that euthanasia is, or soon will be, illegal in Belgium: rather, it merely notes that key provisions of the law cannot be consistently reconciled with Belgium’s Constitution.

In its written judgment, the Court concluded that Article 3 of the current euthanasia law implies that violation of the so-called ‘procedural’ conditions for legally ending someone’s life is punishable by the same standards as the violation of so-called ‘fundamental’ conditions.

This, the Court argued, is both intuitively unreasonable — given that it implies that a doctor who violated a minor procedural condition while administering euthanasia would be technically guilty of murder — but it is also unconstitutional, insofar as it violates the principles of equality and non-discrimination enshrined by Articles 10 and 11 of the Belgian Constitution.

In other words, doctors who kill patients at their request will have to be better protected by law against prosecution — which is the kind of situation that led to this ruling:

The Court’s ruling follows that of a controversial recent legal case in the city of Dendermonde in East Flanders, in which several doctors were acquitted of the murder of Tine Nys, a 38-year-old patient who claimed to be experiencing “unbearable psychological suffering.”

The doctors’ defence counsel successfully argued that [it] was unjustifiable to accuse the doctors administering Nys’ euthanasia of murder when they had only violated a procedural condition.

Here’s the key point in the story:

Many in Belgium believe that the country’s current euthanasia law is not permissive enough, given that, among other things, it presents enormous legal barriers towards providing physician-assisted dying for those suffering from dementia.

Rather than restricting doctor-administered death, the ruling in fact means that the law will be amended to make it easier and less risky to euthanize the mentally ill, elderly couples who fear widowhood, very sick babies, the victims of botched sex-change surgeries, the chronically ill and disabled, people with PTSD, etc., with organ harvesting thrown in the deal as a plum to society.

Euthanasia legalization takes society down a one-way street towards having an ever-expanding killable caste.