The national government must enable mayors to intervene online against possible disturbances. That call is made in an opinion piece by Utrecht mayor Sharon Dijksma and 39 other mayors NRC. Ahmed Aboutaleb of Rotterdam and Femke Halsema (Amsterdam), among others, call on “The Hague” to give the local authority “tools” with a change in the law to intervene in advance against possible riots.
The mayors do not yet know exactly how the law should be changed: according to a spokesman for Dijksma, they want to “discuss this with The Hague”. They are mainly concerned with “being able to act online against online-driven riots or violence”. According to the mayors, the current legislation is “outdated”: “Because our current legislation is from before the digital age, it is not explicitly about the distinction between online and physical.”
Digital area ban
They respond to that a decision of the administrative court last week. He brushed aside a ‘digital area ban’ that the municipality of Utrecht had imposed on a then seventeen-year-old boy in 2021. He had called in a chat conversation in the Telegram app to demonstrate against ‘2G’ and the fireworks ban at a specific time and place. “Bring your mates & fireworks.”
Inciting, the municipality of Utrecht thought: a few days earlier, a corona demonstration on Coolsingel in Rotterdam had ended in serious disturbances. The boy would therefore not only have called for a demonstration, but also for a disturbance of public order. According to the municipality, the boy had to “abstain from online statements that could lead to disorder in the city”, under a penalty payment.
But according to the administrative court, a group chat does not count as a “public place” as referred to in local rules. This concerns a “physical place”, according to the judge. Moreover, the area ban went against freedom of expression, which may not be restricted by municipalities. According to the mayors, the ruling has taken “a valuable, preventive instrument” off their hands.
More and more resources
The mayors’ call fits in with the trend in which they want more and more resources to deal with (possible) public disturbances. In 2019, for example, they proposed giving mayors the powers not only to ‘fight’ crime, but also to ‘prevent it’. The Council of State was very critical of this: the mayor could then become more powerful than the police and the Public Prosecution Service. Moreover, mayors already have many resources to tackle crime, the Council wrote at the time. According to the Council, the mayor as a ‘crime fighter’ did not fit into the Dutch constitution.