An appeals court on Tuesday barred Dutch military police from using racial profiling as a way to select people for identity checks at borders, marking a victory for two citizens and human rights groups who sued the government. .
The Court of Appeal in The Hague overturned a 2021 ruling that said ethnicity could be one of the criteria for targeting passengers, but not the only one. Checks are carried out at airports and on trains and buses to destinations in the European Union to prevent people from entering and staying in the Netherlands illegally.
The appeal court said in a statement that it found that the police, called the Marechaussee, “make a distinction on the basis of race. Given the serious consequences of discrimination based on race, such discrimination should only be made if there are particularly compelling reasons.” “. reasons. The State has not demonstrated such compelling reasons.”
The court said it “therefore prohibits the state from making selection decisions that are (partly) based on race” during border checks.
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The case was brought by two citizens who argued that the country’s Marechaussee police officers singled them out for control because of the color of their skin.
One of the plaintiffs, Mpanzu Bamenga, an Eindhoven city councilor who was born in Congo, said after the original ruling in 2021, every time I returned to “my country, the Netherlands, I was detained because of my ethnicity.”
On Tuesday, he was elated by the court’s ruling.
Mpanzu Bamenga, center, stands with her legal team in front of a district court courtroom in The Hague in the Netherlands on September 22, 2021. The court banned the Dutch military police from using racial profiling to select people for identity checks at borders on February 22, 2021. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Mike Corder, File)
“This is discrimination, this is ethnic profiling,” he said in a telephone interview. And it’s so wonderful to see the higher courts basically recognize that. And for me as a human being, it’s great to see that justice has prevailed.”
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The Marechaussee said after the 2021 court case that it would change the way it works at border controls, but the appeals court said it saw “no change or only a limited change in the method of work.”
Marechaussee’s spokesman, Major Robert van Kapel, said the organization would carefully study the ruling “and see what its consequences are for now.”
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The organization has the option of appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court.
Dionne Abdoelhafiezkhan, of the Dutch human rights group Controle Alt Delete, said the court ruling “also makes it clear that a person’s appearance and color say nothing about someone’s nationality. That is an important correction to the previous ruling by the court that shocked many people of color and made us feel like second-class citizens.”
