Dutch government not eliminating risks of ethnic profiling: Amnesty International

The government is allowing great risks of ethnic profiling to persist, Amnesty International said in a report published on Thursday, the International Day against Racism and Discrimination. According to the human rights organization, the Dutch government has not yet taken effective and binding measures to combat ethnic profiling.

According to Amnesty International researchers, the steps that have been taken fall short of protecting people in the Netherlands against discrimination by the government. Supervisory bodies have insufficient powers, and citizens currently wait longer than a year for their complaints to be processed, Amnesty International said. The human rights organization urged the government to address this.

Amnesty International also said that the government should not treat citizens as a group but as individuals and approach them with trust. Furthermore, there must be legally established rules for government inspections so that it is clear to both civil servants and citizens what is and is not allowed, the researchers wrote in the report. Currently, government organizations have broad powers to monitor people, and according to the human rights organization, this “opens the door to abuse of power and ethnic profiling.”

This week, outgoing Minister Karien van Gennip of Social Affairs apologized to 12 people for unlawfully using their personal data in a covert investigation into radicalization and Salafist Islam. The Ministry had quietly investigated Muslims and mosques without their knowledge.

Also in the past year, Statistics Netherlands reported that people with diverse backgrounds are more often stopped by the Dutch police, the CTIVD revealed that the police intelligence services had unlawfully monitored entire population groups, NRC revealed that the Tax Authority profiled citizens and collected their social media posts, and investigative journalists found that ethnically diverse students were wildly overrepresented in education agency DUO’s fraud investigations.