NEW YORK • A Belgian court has acquitted three doctors who had been charged with manslaughter by poisoning, in a landmark case that, for the first time, charged health professionals criminally under Belgium’s physician-assisted suicide law.
Physician-assisted suicide has been legal in Belgium since 2002. It also is legal in the Netherlands and Luxembourg, but has long been debated in Europe.
While certain forms of assisted suicide are practised in France and Switzerland, the Belgian law goes further. Belgium allows physician-assisted suicide if an individual who is incurably ill and encounters unbearable physical or psychological pain makes a voluntary, well-considered and repeated request, without external pressure.
Since 2014, minors can also request physician-assisted suicide under certain conditions.
The three doctors were facing life-imprisonment sentences over accusations that they had unlawfully poisoned a 38-year-old woman in 2010.
The woman, Ms Tine Nys, requested physician-assisted suicide under the law in 2009, according to Mr Joris Van Cauter, the lawyer for Ms Sophie Nys, one of her two sisters, who said that Ms Tine Nys had suffered from depression and heroin addiction and had tried to commit suicide several times.
A few months later, the lawyer said, she was diagnosed with autism by a psychiatrist.
She received a lethal injection on April 27, 2010, in the company of her parents and her two sisters.
But Ms Sophie Nys later argued that Ms Tine Nys had not received sufficient advice, and that doctors had not tried to treat her mental illness.
Ms Sophie Nys filed a complaint, saying that Ms Tine Nys had not been incurably ill, as the Belgian physician-assisted suicide law requires.
A minority of physician-assisted suicide requests are granted in Belgium when the patient has psychological issues.
Ms Sophie Nys’ complaint was initially rejected by a court, but later permitted on appeal.
“It makes you wonder about medicine and how you make life or death decisions,” Mr Van Cauter said about the three doctors who were standing trial.
“My client asked, ‘How can you say that you tried to treat her?'”
Mr Van Cauter added that his client and her family had not wanted the doctors to go to prison; instead, they wanted an official acknowledgement that physician-assisted suicide should not have been administered under the circumstances.
“It’s a bit disappointing,” the lawyer said of the decision, adding that the way Ms Tine Nys was treated “was very sad”.
After a two-week trial and eight hours of final debate, a 12-person jury in the criminal court of Ghent, in north-western Belgium, cleared the three practitioners – the doctor who made the lethal injection, the general practitioner and a psychiatrist.
Mr Walter Van Steenbrugge, the lawyer of one of the doctors, Dr Joris Van Hove, said a conviction would have established a dangerous precedent for professionals practising physician-assisted suicide.
He said that he and his peers had received dozens of letters from worried doctors who said that they had halted physician-assisted suicide procedures for fear of legal consequences.
“My client is very relieved,” Mr Van Steenbrugge said. “There was a lot at stake, not only for Belgium but also for Europe in general.”
More than 2,350 people were permitted physician-assisted suicide in Belgium in 2018, according to the latest public figures.
In the Netherlands, a doctor was acquitted last September after having been accused of failing to secure proper consent from a 74-year-old patient who suffered from Alzheimer’s and had been administered physician-assisted suicide by the doctor.
In France, a 42-year-old nurse who had been in a vegetative state for more than a decade died last July, after doctors stopped feeding him artificially, following years of legal battles.
The case that has received the most attention in recent years in Belgium was of 40-year-old Paralympian champion Marieke Vervoort, who was suffering from an incurable degenerative muscle disease and died last October, 11 years after having signed the papers paving the way for her death.
In Ms Tine Nys’ case, Mr Van Steenbrugge said that the acquittal had sent a strong, reassuring message to doctors.
“It was not manslaughter; it wasn’t a crime,” he said. “It was euthanasia.”
NYTIMES