Prime Minister Mark Rutte has deleted daily messages from his phone for years, because his device did not have enough storage space to keep everything. That said the State Attorney on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by de Volkskrantlike this reports that newspaper on Wednesday† Whether Rutte has thereby violated the Archives Act, which stipulates that directors must keep certain correspondence, is not clear according to the newspaper.
For years Rutte did not use a smartphone to work on, but an old device with push buttons. The prime minister also had another phone with more storage space during the same period, but he said he only used it to follow the news. The Government Information Service told de Volkskrant that that phone was “not sufficiently supported in all countries.” Since Thursday, the prime minister would use a work phone with more memory.
Because the phone he used had little storage space, Rutte has been doing “real-time archiving” in recent years, the State Attorney said on Tuesday. He could save a maximum of twenty text messages and therefore decided for himself whether a text message should be kept or destroyed. The prime minister is said to have forwarded text messages that he considered important to officials. He removed the rest. Rutte thus distinguished himself from ministers “who keep everything until the end of the day”, according to the State Attorney. “I wish more drivers would do it that way.”
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The Archives Act stipulates that some correspondence from ministers and government bodies must be kept, among other things in order to be able to explain to the public – such as MPs and journalists – why certain (political) choices have been made. There are selection lists for every government agency that determine what correspondence should be archived† These messages can be requested via the Open Government Act (Woo) – since 1 May the replacement of the Open Government Act (Wob) -.
It was unclear for a long time whether text messages and other messaging services, such as WhatsApp, were also covered by the disclosure requests. In 2019, the Council of State ruled that text messages could also be retrieved. De Volkskrant last year appealed to the Wob and thus gained access to a series of text messages from Rutte.
Between the messages that de Volkskrant only saw text messages that Rutte had sent to his own officials. Also, to comply with the newspaper’s request, messages in the prime minister’s phone were never searched, but only in those of officials. The newspaper considered that “limited correspondence implausible.” In court on Tuesday it turned out that searching again in the prime minister’s phone will not make sense.
Also read: ‘New management culture’: what became of Rutte’s good intentions?