23 Years of Euthanasia in Belgium

Euthanasia was set in stone in Belgian law on May 28, 2002, for adults suffering from “constant, unbearable, and unappeasable physical or psychological suffering” due to a “serious and incurable” condition. In 2014, it was extended to minors without an age limit, under certain conditions concerning the capacity of discernment and parental consent.

A Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia (CFCEE) is supposed to supervise the application of the law and verify that each case meets the legal criteria. It has just published, on January 22, 2025, its latest report covering the years 2022-2023. The figures provided are disheartening: since 2002, the number of reported euthanasia cases has continued to increase.

Thus, between 2002 and 2023, more than 33,615 people were euthanized according to official reports. In 2023, the last full year for which detailed figures are available, 3,423 cases of euthanasia were recorded, an increase of 15% compared to 2022 (2,966 cases). This represents approximately 3.1% of deaths in Belgium that year, compared to 2.5% in 2022. This growth is continuous: the number has increased more than tenfold since 2003, the first full year of application.

The most common conditions leading to requests remain cancer (55.5% in 2023), followed by multiple pathologies (23.2%), often linked to aging (heart failure, stroke, etc.). However, there has been a notable increase in cases for psychiatric disorders (1.4%, or 48 cases in 2023) and cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's (1.2%).

Euthanasia of minors remains rare: five cases since 2014, including a 16-year-old girl in 2023, suffering from a brain tumor. But the simple fact of putting a child to death shows the state of barbarity a society has fallen into.

It is worth noting the emerging phenomenon of the influx of foreign patients, mainly French (101 of the 110 cases in 2023), who are attracted by the Belgian legislation, which does not exist in France.

What can be said about the increase in euthanasia for multiple pathologies, which are not always fatal but cumulative with age? In 2023, 20.8% of cases (more than 700 people) concerned patients whose death was not imminent, compared to 4% in 2012.

Psychiatric disorders, although marginal, fuel the accusation of drift, particularly on the difficulty in assessing incurability and the subjectivity of psychological suffering. 

Palliative care, although available, is often relegated to the background. In fact, this is the sinister path upon which France was embarking before the dissolution of June 2024. François Bayrou's government intends to split the initial bill on the end of life in order to give priority to palliative care over euthanasia: a tactic that progressives were quick to accuse of hypocrisy.

The CFCEE report highlights this banality of evil evoked by Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963. According to the philosopher, the most unheard-of evil - embodied at the time by the death camps - can be committed by criminals who act with the attitude of those who would pose banal facts as common or ordinary in their eyes.

It is indeed to this perverse mechanism that euthanasia refers us when it becomes legalized, like a treatment. It remains to be seen whether France will be able to resist the sinister sirens of death in white coats.