Professor Theo Boer:

In fact, since 2012 we have not several companies; we have only one. It was called the end-of-life clinic and it was established by the Dutch voluntary euthanasia society because it thought normal doctors were too slow in granting euthanasia. It erected this special centre and it is made up of a group of 50 physicians and perhaps 100 staff members who perform euthanasia without any prior patient-doctor relationship. They send teams all over the country and they have conversations prior to performing euthanasia. These doctors perform euthanasia for the special cases where normal physicians would not try because they are afraid, especially in psychiatric cases.

The Senator had a question about the reporting of cases. While we had close to 9,000 reports in 2022, a governmental evaluation has indicated that in spite of all the efforts to get more transparency, there are still some - between 10% and 15% - in a grey zone where physicians would describe their own actions as termination of life but they do not report it as such. These percentages would account for approximately 1,500 cases.