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My point is that, in the absence of actual evidence of institutional failures, we should assume they're working properly. "Something looks wrong" is not evidence. If something does look wrong to someone, they can investigate. Maybe they'll find evidence of wrongdoing, but if they don't find anything after a reasonably thorough investigation, the matter should be dropped. "Something looks wrong" is unfalsifiable.
There's evidence of euthanasia being over-promoted by the same doctors who are supposed to be guardians of it, I posted it on this thread and so did others. So there's definitely not "the absence of actual evidence of institutional failures", quite the contrary.
Not really. Only if someone is a DA or similar person in power, and they have motivation to intervene for some reason. Otherwise, there won't be any investigation at all, let alone "reasonably thorough" one.
We're not talking here about scientific paper and abstract scientific pursuits, where "we still don't know whether theory X is true or not" is an OK outcome and in general we're fine with waiting for conclusive evidence one way or another. When we're talking about killing people, "you can't scientifically prove there's something wrong here, therefore we're fine to assume it's ok and not knowing one way or another is completely OK too" shouldn't be the bar it has to clear. It should be much, much higher than that. If something looks wrong, there should be an overwhelming and obvious proof it's not, and "if something were wrong, somebody would investigate it" shouldn't cut it too. When we're talking about irreversible actions of this magnitude, we can't approach it in the same way as we manager parking tickets - "this officer has been issuing tickets for 20 years, so if you can't conclusively prove she was wrong, we assume it's ok". We have to erect a higher bar on this.
I assume this is the comment to which you are referring. It talks about Canada. As I have noted elsewhere in the thread:
And as far I know, this is true for Belgium.
It is my understanding that in continental European legal systems, public prosecutors don't have any discretion in choosing whether or not to prosecute a certain crime, as American DAs do. Hence, the prosecutor must have investigated the case thoroughly enough to conclude that no crime took place. As I said, this seems like enough scrutiny. If you added, say, an ombudsman who reviews the prosecutor's actions, and they concluded that the prosecutor had done nothing wrong, you could just say the ombudsman is in on it. And this can go on indefinitely, which is why I said the claim was unfalsifiable.
Oh and, I forgot to mention: according to the article, in addition to the panel of doctors and the prosecutor, the woman was "supported by her friends and family" in making the decision. I agree that we have to have a high bar for cases like this; I just think the bar was met in this case.
Public prosecutors do in fact have considerable discretion here in what cases they choose to prosecute. Possibly the most obvious example of this being the decriminalised (but not quite legal) status of cannabis in the Netherlands.
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