Netherlands reports first euthanasia death of child under 12

The Netherlands has recorded its first euthanasia death of a child under 12, a case Health Minister Sophie Hermans brought to parliament in a letter on June 23, 2026. Dutch officials said the child died at the end of 2025, but they did not disclose the child’s age, sex or medical condition.

The case was sent to the special committee that reviews medically assisted deaths of children and was also referred to the Public Prosecution Service, which will decide whether the doctors complied with the country’s strict legal safeguards. Under the Dutch framework for children aged 1 to 12, parents must consent once a doctor has established that no treatment is available, and the child should be involved insofar as possible. The review committee is made up of four doctors, a lawyer and an ethicist.

The under-12 regulation took effect on February 1, 2024, closing a gap in Dutch law that had covered newborns and children aged 12 and older but not those between 1 and 12. The Netherlands legalized euthanasia for adults in 2002, and the pediatric expansion was described by the Royal Dutch Medical Association as a major but controversial step. In 2022, KNMG said the proposed ministerial regulation offered insufficient legal certainty for doctors, a warning that helped frame the debate before the rule was adopted.

Lawmakers expected roughly five cases a year when the under-12 rule was introduced, though some reporting put the estimate at five to 10 annually. The first recorded case will deepen scrutiny of a system already used on a much larger scale in adult end-of-life care: euthanasia was performed 9,068 times in the Netherlands in 2023, and Dutch reporting on the annual review said around 6 percent of all deaths in the country last year were through euthanasia. Before the 2024 change, terminally ill children who wanted to end their lives could only do so through palliative sedation or by refusing food and water.

The Dutch approach sits within a broader framework of oversight committees and earlier neonatal rules often associated with the Groningen Protocol. Belgium became the first country in the world to make euthanasia available for all children in 2014, making the Dutch case part of a wider European debate over how far pediatric end-of-life law can be extended while still claiming legal certainty.