The West’s uncivilised euthanasia policy

So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since the following story has gone almost unheeded in the Anglophone press, let me point at one especially suggestive current which could be glimpsed on the Continent this month.

Cast your mind back to March 2016 and you may remember a co-ordinated set of suicide bombings in Brussels: two at the airport, one at a metro station. The three Isis-inspired terrorists managed to kill 32 people that day. But you may, understandably enough, have forgotten about it. The attacks came after the even larger ones in Paris, and people didn’t really have much to say about them. My principal memory is of being asked on to Radio 4’s The Moral Maze the following evening to discuss the question of whether there are tensions between security and privacy – or some such bilge – and losing what remained of my patience.

The victims that morning included members of a school party heading to Rome. Unlike many of her classmates, Shanti De Corte was not among them. Miraculously, she didn’t sustain any physical injuries. But the 17-year-old was standing just a few metres from one of the suicide bombers at the airport and was severely traumatised by what she saw.

As it happens, in a couple of weeks a cell of nine defendants will be going on trial for their role in the attacks. The trial was delayed because of a controversy over the conditions in which they were due to appear: in individual closed glass cubicles. This seems to have been deemed inhumane by the Belgian authorities.

Whether being isolated in a self-enclosed glass cubicle is inhumane or not is the sort of row that Belgian justice – like our own – excels at.