Willem Witteveen

Willem Johannes Witteveen (; 5 May 195217 July 2014) was a Dutch legal scholar, politician, and author. He was a law professor at Tilburg University (1990–2014) and a Member of the Senate for the Labour Party (1999–2007; 2013–2014). He was also the author of several books about law and politics. Witteveen was killed on 17 July 2014 when the flight he was travelling on, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, was shot down over eastern Ukraine.

Early life and education Willem Johannes Witteveen was born on 5 May 1952 in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

He was the son of liberal politician Johan Witteveen and Liesbeth de Vries Feijens. He was also the great-grandson of social-democratic politician Floor Wibaut. He had three brothers and a sister.

Witteveen was a member of the Labour Party since 1994. He was chairman of the party platform committee of the Labour Party in 1998–99. He was a member of the Senate from 1999 to 2007, where he was chairman of the committee for Internal Affairs and the High Councils of State. In the 2007 and 2011 Senate elections, he was at an unelectable position on the candidate list. From 2013 to his death, he was again a senator.

Witteveen had finished the manuscript of his book De wet als kunstwerk (The law as work of art) shortly before his death. The book was posthumously released in November 2014.

Death Witteveen was killed on 17 July 2014 at the age of 62, along with his wife Lidwien Heerkens and their daughter Marit Witteveen.

Personal life Like his father, Witteveen was a Universal Sufist. In 1978, he married Lidwien Heerkens; the couple had two children, a daughter Marit and a son Freek. The family lived in Breda in North Brabant. His son Freek later became a quantum computing researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

Legacy A street in Breda, the Willem Witteveenhof, has been named after Witteveen in 2020. Witteveen lived in the adjacent street, the Burgemeester Passtoorsstraat, at the time of his passing.