Dutch cops could use commercial DNA databases in criminal cases despite privacy concerns

The new Dutch government wants to allow the police to use commercial DNA databases in cold case criminal investigations, according to the PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB’s coalition agreement. The authorities see it as a great opportunity to solve unsolved crimes, but lawyers have privacy concerns, Nieuwsuur reports.

Currently, the police can only use DNA from its own database, collected from people convicted of serious crimes, in its criminal investigations. The new right-wing government wants to also give the police access to commercial databases, like from companies that do family tree investigations. The United States already allows this. In 2018, that resulted in the capture of the “Golden State Killer” - a serial killer who killed and raped at least 13 women between 1976 and 1986.

Lex Meulenbroek, a DNA expert at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), called giving the police access to commercial databases a “great opportunity to still solve serious cases.” The Public Prosecution Service (OM) is already experimenting with it in two unsolved Limburg murders - the murder of Sjef Leukel from Berg en Terbblijt in 2004 and the murder of a still unidentified woman whose body was found in the Pieterplas near Maastricht in 2013.

However, lawyers have doubts about the legal tenability of this step and what it would mean for privacy. Lawyer Geert-Jan Knoops thinks that the courts should rule on whether this is a good idea. “This is a constitutional interest,” he told Nieuwsuur. He pointed out that the commercial family tree companies are all abroad and, therefore, not subject to Dutch law or supervision from the Ministry of Justice and Security. That is an issue, Knoops said. “Because those are conditions in our current legislation for DNA research. Also for kinship research.”

Lawyer Bénédicte Ficq called the method “extremely questionable.” The authorities say they only use DNA if the people involved give permission, but Ficq worries that people sign the terms and conditions for family tree research without carefully reading them.

Even if people give informed consent for their DNA to be shared, this still entails “interesting privacy questions,” Nina de Groot, a bioethicist at the VU University Amsterdam, told the program. “Because the thousands of relatives of that person have not given permission. If my second cousin has given permission, but I have not, how far does his permission go?” De Groot realizes it is important to find perpetrators but doesn’t think this should happen at the expense of people’s fundamental rights. “It concerns the privacy of many innocent citizens.”