Netherlands: Intelligence Targets Revealed
01 January 1997
Recent attempts by a campaigning organisation to acquire access to their personal Binnenlands Veiligheids Dienst (Dutch secret service, BVD) files has exposed the limitations of the Dutch Freedom of Information act. It also gives an insight into areas of political activity that the BVD still consider to be "current" and therefore under their remit.
The Vereniging Steunpunt Inzage PID Nijmegen (Support Organisation for insight into the Nijmegen Special Branch) has campaigned since 1992 for their members to be allowed to have access to their personal files. They are specifically interested in files held by the South Gelderland Regionaal Inlichtingen Dienst and the BVD.
A ruling of the Dutch supreme court in 1994 allowed limited access to their files. However since then the government has continued to restrict access, insisting that any request for access to files was accompanied with elaborate explanations of the social and civic context within which any document was requested.
Current rights of access to personal files are based on the condition that no information should be allowed to provide access to any sources, methods of work or current areas of intelligence acquisition of the BVD. This last area has proved to be quite revealing. One applicant for instance, who was dismissed from her job after the BVD paid a visit to her employer, was only allowed to see a paraphrased summary of her file rather than the complete document, under the "area of current activity" clause. The original reason for the BVD visit was a phone call she made to an Amsterdam based refugee organisation.
Other applicants have discovered that, while the Dutch Communist Party is no longer considered to be "current", members of other left-wing groups are still refused access to their file. Other current targets include anti-militarists, anti-fascists and anyone who has ever visited Northern Ireland, no matter how long ago.
The Vereniging SIP also point out that even activities no longer considered "current" such as anti-apartheid work can still apparently be considered "current" in the event that an individual took part in "radical" anti-apartheid activity, meaning that access to that individual's file will be refused. SIP claim that, owing to restrictions on the revealing of sources, obtaining access to a person's file often means that the only information that will be found consists of publicly available articles written by that person. They argue that the fight for access to intelligence files is still to be won.
Ravage, 7.2.97.