Netherlands: Activists compensated
01 July 1994
A burglary by activists on 19 November 1984 in the offices of the Netherlands' Counter Intelligence Detachment of the Landmacht Inlichtingendienst (Army Intelligence Service) in Utrecht uncovered documents indicating that the military intelligence service held extensive dossiers on many members of the anti- militarist and peace movements and on other organizations. The publication of stolen documents led to the reorganization of the intelligence services of army, air force and navy into one central Military Intelligence Service to improve oversight. Ten people united in their protest against their being registered and filed for access to their files. All Dutch courts rejected their demands, but their appeal to the European Commission for Human Rights proved more successful - the group of ten anti-militarist and peace activists (Vleugels et al) were granted one thousand guilders compensation each. The Commission ruled that the 1972 Royal Decree by which the intelligence services function did not adequately formulate the conditions under which the military intelligence service was allowed to spy on people and thus violated article 8 of the European Convention on Human rights. Specifically the Commission ruled that the tasks and competencies of the service, the categories of people that could become the object of investigation, the circumstances under which this could take place and the measures that could be used are insufficiently indicated in the Decree. Also the safeguards (ie: access to a court, a sufficiently powerful ombudsman etc.) fall short of what the European Convention and jurisprudence would require. Finally, the control over the intelligence service was found to be inadequate.
The importance of the ECHR case is that Dutch legal safeguards are considered inadequate by the European Commission. Although the Commission's ruling formally addressed itself against the 1972 Decree, the wording of the 1988 Law on the Intelligence and Security Services is virtually identical and thus the ruling would seem to bear on the present law and on the BVD which operates under the same rules. This has now been reaffirmed by the Dutch Raad van State. There have not been any formal reactions to the Raad's ruling so far, but it can be expected that the Minister for the Interior will have to reconcile privacy concerns with the BVD's security obsessions.