NETHERLANDS DUO EUTHANASIA OF A FORMER PRIME MINISTER AND HIS WIFE

Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Dries van Agt died on Monday February 5 in Nijmegen (Netherlands) at the same time as his wife Eugénie van Agt-Krekelberg as part of an assisted suicide procedure, reports the Dutch daily From Telegraaf.

Prime minister between 1977 and 1982 and first leader of his political party, the Catholic People's Party (KVP), which has since become the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Dries van Agt was ambassador of the European Union to Japan and the United States -United in the 1980s. A lawyer by training, he practiced in Eindhoven, before becoming a law professor at the Catholic University of Nijmegen from 1968 to 1971. He left his teaching position to join the government.

He suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2019 and had since been very weakened.

The announcement of the “duo” euthanasia of the Agt couple was made by the Rights Forum, a research center on Israel and the Palestinians, which the former Dutch Catholic prime minister had founded. The Rights Forum specified that Dries van Agt had left “hand in hand with his wife” to Nijmegen. Their funerals were organized in family privacy, without further details of their deaths being communicated. Assisted suicide has been legal since 2002 in the Netherlands.

They “couldn’t live without each other”

Questioned by the Dutch television channel NOS, the director of the Rights Forum, Gerard Jonkman, indicated that Dries and Eugénie van Agt, both 93 years old, were very ill but “could not live without each other” after having lived together for seventy years.

Outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he was saddened by the death of the man he called his “practicing great-great-grandfather”.

“The death of Dries van Agt and his inseparable Eugénie, with whom he was united in love until the end, is sad. Dries van Agt remained completely authentic throughout his life,” responded the Dutch head of government.