Outgoing minister Wiersma (agriculture, BBB) must release emission data from agricultural companies within two weeks. That was previously requested by appeal to the Open Government Act (WOO) NRCFollow the Money and Omroep Gelderland. For example, it concerns stalt type and number of animals at a company. The Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Council of State decided on Wednesday in an appeal that the minister had registered against a judgment of the lower court.
That judge had ruled in June that Wiersma had abused her powers when she had withdrawn a disclosure decision from her predecessor last January. The administrative court does not take over that judgment on abuse of power, but the information for 2010, 2015, 2020, 2021 and 2022 must be made public. Here Follow the Money, Omroep Gelderland and NRC Asked for from the end of 2022. The journalists want to be able to calculate with the emission data, for example, to be able to assess the effectiveness of the nitrogen policy.
“That enables us to quickly conduct journalism research into, for example, the new buy -out scheme,” respond NRC-editors Rik Wassens and Wouter van Loon in a statement. “But it is sad that we had to wait almost three years for this data, and that the Council of State was needed to ensure that this minister adheres to the law.”
No penalty
In a summary proceedings in The Hague in August it was previously stipulated that the minister had to release the emission data for 2023 in the province of Gelderland, which had been requested by Omroep Gelderland. This data has since been made public, the day before a penalty of half a million euros per day would apply.
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The administrative court now sees no reason to impose a penalty, since the minister had stated at the hearing via the national lawyer that the ruling would be followed. The administrative court believes that the data should be published faster than what the minister had requested if the ruling were to its disadvantage. She stated that she needed three to eight weeks to inform farmers about the publicity of their data.
Wiersma’s predecessor Piet Adema (ChristenUnie) had already determined in 2023 that the emission data had to be released under the Open Government Act. With a publication in the Government Gazette, agricultural companies were pointed to the opinion procedure, with which an interested party can make an objection to disclosure. About three thousand farmers had done that, but according to Wiersma that did not mean that all companies knew what was coming. In total, data from about thirty thousand farms would be made public.
New procedure
Wiersma decided to a new opinion procedure to offer companies the opportunity to object again. For that, she would have to inform all companies by letter, which would cost her months. She acknowledged that the data must eventually be released, but relied on the principle of care. This would not have been justified by her predecessor with ‘only’ a publication in the Government Gazette. However, the administrative court considers the previously chosen route of its predecessor carefully enough.
Various agricultural organizations, including Farmers Defense Force, had joined the minister’s procedure. They thought that there is also not in all cases emission data that must be publicly, but the administrative court does not agree with that. The organizations are mainly concerned about activists who could go to the database in the database and then take action with farmers in the yard. Often the company address is also the home address of farmers’ families. De Woo gives no room to weigh the personal interests of the farmers when it comes to emission data, according to the administrative court.
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