Netherlands: Change of policing policy?
01 November 1994
The new Minister of Justice, Mrs Winnie Sorgdrager, in the new "purple coalition" government in Holland, composed of the Social Democrats and two Liberal parties (excluding the Christian-Democrats for the first time since 1945), has some markedly different views from the former Christian Democrat Minister Mr Ernst Hirsch Ballin. Together with Minister of the Interior, Mr Hans Dijkstal (VVD, Liberal Conservatives), she has managed to limit the influence of police chiefs and attorney generals on policy - taking the lesson of the IRT affair to heart. Mrs Sorgdrager has voiced her concern over threats to privacy posed by certain proactive police methods such as inkijkoperaties in private homes (peeping operations, ie: burglarizing without a search warrant), and has announced her intention to withdraw some bills which would introduce wider police powers, including bugging by microphones and deals with crown witnesses.
The new Minister has come up through the ranks as a public prosecutor and an attorney general and has warned against an arms race between the police and professional criminals. One of her first initiatives was to start a debate and encourage local experiments to supply long time drug addicts with heroine under strict medical guidance, a novelty in Holland. She has expressed the desire to stop the building of new prison cells in 1996 while bringing more prisoners into alternative punishment programs including social work during the second half of their detention.
On Monday 21, November a The Hague chief police inspector testified to the Amsterdam court how the team he led in a major cannabis investigation had executed no less than six inkijkoperaties in the 1990/1991 period without informing the public prosecutor who was in charge of the investigation. The chief inspector stated that the permission of public prosecutor Mr J Van Eck was not sought as "he would never have approved the methods". He added that such sensitive methods were never put down in writing to avoid discovery by the suspects' lawyers. Also his superiors in the police force were kept unaware under a strict need-to-know doctrine to avoid embarrassment. The president of the court Mr J Willems voiced his strong disapproval of the modus operandi. The result may be that the imprisonment of three detainees will have to be overturned and considerable damages paid. Police chiefs fear that these developments may create a domino effect in which one big trial after another will have to be reconsidered ending in the discrediting of Dutch law enforcement in serious crime cases and police credibility.up