Dying in the arms of Dutch governmental authorities

Thorough investigation of deaths related to police actions or of persons placed under the ‘care’ of governmental authorities is anchored in the legal systems of every democratic system. The quality of this investigation should be guarded by an adequate set of control measures. Recently the Dutch Ombudsman published a report about this issue In the Netherlands no central registry of these deaths exists. The estimates based on the available data number some 400–500 deaths in custody in the past 10 years in the Netherlands of which only in 193 cases a legal postmortem was performed. We present an overview of these cases and discuss the present Dutch practice in the perspective of national and international legislation.