The Netherlands¶
The Dutch cases reveal how suspicion becomes an administrative instruction, often without anyone examining its grounds. These are different legal processes, but they reveal a common weakness. Institutions can act on classifications, sanctions and requests without independently questioning the political assumptions behind them. Responsibility is divided among those who identify a risk, those who translate it into procedure, and those who carry out the resulting decision. Each can regard its own part as ordinary administration, while responsibility for the original judgement falls between them, even when the combined effect is political exclusion.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these. People flagged by their own tax authority on the grounds of origin or religion carried the cost without knowing who had judged them. The International Criminal Court, which the Netherlands hosts, and its staff and suppliers learn that the government’s words and its firms’ contracts can part company. Organisations that host abroad or rely on foreign platforms learn that another state’s request can be executed as routine. A requirement that someone in the chain examine the political judgement behind a request or listing, and answer for it, would interrupt this.
October 2026: The server goes abroad¶
On Tuesday 13 October 2026 a unit of the Amsterdam police seized a server belonging to Autistici/Inventati at a data centre on the Science Park, NRC reported, on the basis of a mutual legal assistance request from the United States. Police experts are making an image of it, and the copy, a spokesperson said, “gaat linea recta naar Amerika”, goes straight to America; the owners get the hardware back. Asked about the request, the spokesperson said: “Dat voer je dan gewoon uit”, you simply carry it out. The collective, which had offered free hosting and mail to some 20,000 organisations, had already been wiping its disks across Europe, and one of the people winding it up said the encrypted server held nothing that could harm its users. The clerks note that the designation in August needed nothing from the Dutch state, and that the server did.
October 2026: The minister reassures¶
On 9 October 2026 the foreign minister, Tom Berendsen, said of the sanctions announced against the International Criminal Court that “the sanctions will not take effect immediately” and that “service providers can continue their work for the ICC”. The clerks note that the reassurance came about a month after a Dutch provider had, by the members’ account, already stepped back.
September 2026: Hands off, unnamed¶
On 24 September 2026 the prime minister, Rob Jetten, told the UN General Assembly “hands off the ICC, and all those other institutions that protect the international legal order”, after the United States had sanctioned the Court’s president and others in August. The speech does not name the United States. The clerks note that a government that will not name the sanctioning state leaves its own firms to guess how far its defence of the Court reaches.
September 2026: The host city’s hosting company¶
On 10 September 2026 the members Kathmann (PRO) and El Boujdaini (D66) asked the cabinet how it responds to ProcoliX, “een bedrijf dat als gevolg van de Amerikaanse interventie bij het Italiaanse bedrijf A/I geen opdracht meer aanneemt van het Internationaal Strafhof”, and whether it condemns the United States for putting internet providers on the terrorist list for political reasons. On 28 September the answer was postponed. The clerks observe that a Dutch firm watched what happened to an Italian collective, cut its tie to the court its own government defends, and did not wait to be asked: self-purification, travelling from Pisa to The Hague in a fortnight. The full account is in Not in so many words.
May 2026: The Refinery¶
On 28 May 2026 the government answered questions from the D66 members Jagtenberg and El Boujdaini: the police use Palantir’s software “enkel binnen de zogenaamde ‘Raffinaderij’”, an analysis environment for serious and organised crime and the prevention of attacks, and several operational defence units use it “in volledige afgesloten omgevingen” as a trial. A week later Defence said it wants to replace it with a European alternative within two years. The clerks note that the police’s analysis environment runs on a foreign firm’s software, and that only Defence has said it wants to stop.
April 2022: The blacklist and the mosque¶
The Dutch data protection authority fined the Ministry of Finance a record 3.7 million euro over the tax authority’s Fraude Signalering Voorziening, a blacklist of possible fraudsters kept from 2013 to March 2020. It held 270,000 people, 2,000 of them minors. Internal handbooks show that nationality and age played a role, and a gift to a mosque could be enough for a fraud risk to be attached to someone’s name. The clerks note that the historical record’s “membership in something larger” here took the form of a donation.
December 2021: The second passport¶
The same authority fined the tax authority 2.75 million euro for processing the dual nationality of parents who had applied for childcare benefit. The data should have been deleted in 2014. In May 2018 the systems still held 1.4 million people with a second nationality, filed in part under the fight against organised fraud. The clerks observe that a second passport was treated as a risk signal, which is international ties read as suspicion, carried out by an office looking for fraud rather than for enemies.