A judge in Holland has overruled an 80-year-old doctors' wishes, so she can die by lethal injection

A judge in Holland has ordered the euthanasia of an 80-year-old woman after doctors tried to prevent her family from having her killed.

Doctors serving the Ter Reede dementia specialist care home in Flushing argued that she was not mentally capable of consenting to death by lethal injection.

But for the first time in 13 years of legal euthanasia in the Netherlands, a court over-ruled the doctors’ wishes and ordered that the euthanasia went ahead.

The woman’s family, who live in Middelburg, claimed that she harboured a ‘death wish’ and obtained a court order so she could die by euthanasia.

A judge sitting in an ‘emergency session’ in Utrecht then threw out an appeal from medical staff treating the woman.

A day later she was taken from the care home and killed by the Life End Clinic, which was set up with the aim of making euthanasia more easily accessible in the Netherlands.

According to reports in the Dutch press, Judge Sap told Earl Ter Reede, chairman of the care home, that he had to ‘respect’ the wishes of the woman.

‘It’s not a question of incapacity. You do not want to accept the decision,’ the judge said.

‘You are putting yourselves in this situation on your own. I’m going out from the principle that you are going to respect this woman’s wishes. It’s the last thing you can do for her.’

The woman’s GP, the management of the care home and its psychologist were all equally opposed to plans to kill her by euthanasia and they had asked for an independent report into her condition.

The judge in the Netherlands agreed with the 80-year-old's family that she harboured a 'death wish', and ordered her doctors to 'respect her wishes'. 'It is the last thing you can do for her', he said (stock image)

The woman's GP, management of the care home and its psychologist were all equally opposed to her family's plans for an assisted suicide for the 80-year-old woman (stock image)

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise euthanasia since Nazi Germany when its Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act exempted doctors from prosecution if certain criteria were met.

A patient must be suffering unbearably, for instance - though increasing numbers of lonely, aged, bereaved, depressed or handicapped people are in practice now fitted this category on the grounds they were suffering from ‘mental anguish’.

A woman in her 80s was killed last year simply because she did not want to live in a care home.

A request for euthanasia also had to be voluntary, with dementia patients qualifying only if they had drawn up an advance directive, or ‘living will’. Many doctors remain divided on the morality of euthanasia in situations where a patient has lost the ability to consent.

A survey earlier this year found that of 547 doctors involved in euthanasia, a total of 52 per cent said they would inject a patient who had made an advance directive but was no longer able to express their will.

The liberal interpretation of the law has corresponded with an increase in the number of euthanasia deaths in Holland.

The latest official euthanasia figures revealed a 15 per cent surge in the number of deaths by lethal injection from 4,188 cases in 2012 to 4,829 cases in 2013.

The incremental rise is consistent with a 13 per cent increase in 2012, an 18 per cent rise in 2011, 19 per cent in 2010 and 13 per cent in 2009.

Overall, deaths by euthanasia, which officially account for three per cent of all deaths in the Netherlands, have increased by 151 per cent in just seven years.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise euthanasia (stock image)

Most cases - some 3,600 people – involved cancer sufferers, but there were also 97 people who died at the hands of their doctors because they were suffering from dementia, the figures show.

The figures, however, do not include cases of so-called terminal sedation, where patients are given a cocktail of sedatives and narcotics before food and fluids are withdrawn.

Studies suggest that if such deaths were added to the figure then euthanasia would account for one in eight – about 12.3 per cent – of all deaths in the Netherlands.

Doctors in neighbouring Belgium, which last year legalised euthanasia for children, are now killing an average of five people every day by euthanasia, according to latest figures, with a 27 per cent surge in the number of euthanasia deaths in the last year alone.