Hundreds of suspects may have avoided punishment due to errors in registrations

Around 867 suspects may be able to avoid punishment, with some cases seeing innocent civilians being convicted instead due to an error in registering the names, the Netherlands Court of Audit has reported in their annual accountability research. This research is based on numbers provided by the Justitiële Informatiedienst (Justid).

The figure mentioned concerns the number of cases in which an error was found. It is "certainly not ruled out" that the actual number is higher, the report stated. The Court of Audit has not determined that innocent people are currently in jail as a result of this, but they also cannot rule this out.

A total of 141 cases with this issue were violent crimes or sexual offenses. The Court of Audit has called it “serious incompetence.” They added that it has been unclear since 2012 what needs to happen if a court declares a conviction under the wrong name.

Identity fraud and input mistakes are usually the reason for mistakes when registering the name of a suspect. The report does not state in which years the errors were made.

The Court of Audit shared preliminary investigation results with State Secretary for Legal Protection Teun Struycken at the beginning of this year. It turned out that he was not aware of this problem. After this, the ministry "took steps in the right direction" to improve the situation, the researchers stated. But they have not yet looked into the effect of the measures taken.

The first signs of mistakes with names were already known in 2005, according to Ewout Irrgang, a member of the board of the Court of Audit. He "cannot quite understand" that there is still no solution.

The Court of Audit counted ten errors made by the Ministry of Justice and Security, of which the above-mentioned is the most serious. This is a considerable increase compared to last year, when two shortcomings were found.