The Report of the Federal Control and Evaluation Commission Covering the Years 2006 and 2007.
Belgium legalised voluntary euthanasia in 2002 for persons who are legally competent and “in a medically futile condition of constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated, resulting from a serious and incurable disorder caused by illness or accident”. The 2002 Act created a Federal Control and Evaluation Commission (FCEC) to report biannually on the operation of the law.
Here we provide the French-language version of the FCEC report for Years 2006-07 (an English translation is not available).
The report shows that there were 495 reported cases of euthanasia in Belgium in 2007. This is nearly five times the number in the first complete year of operation of the 2002 law.
It is also interesting to note the disparity between the incidence of euthanasia in Dutch-speaking Flanders and in French-speaking Wallonia: 412 of the 495 reported cases were from the former. 74 per cent of the reported cases were of persons over the age of 60.
As in previous reports, we are told that “the commission was not able to assess the proportion of the number of euthanasias reported as against the number actually carried out”.
Euthanasia-in-Belgium-2006-and-2007