Hardly has the survey report on Groningen’s gas extraction landed than there was an equally disconcerting investigation this week into the three murder attacks in the margins of the Marengo trial. The survey report was received as ‘damning’, the report on ‘Monitoring and Security’ by the Dutch Safety Board (OVV) as ‘harsh’ and ‘painful’. There was widespread failure, incorrect choices and dramatic consequences. Such a confluence can evoke cynicism, or institutional pessimism. From which it was already difficult to break free after the Supplementary Affair.
At the same time, research reports are part of a democratic constitutional state like the man with the broom at the fair. After the performance, self-cleansing and reflection are essential. Research reports give substance to the process of accountability and accountability, provide new information to citizens, make room for new staff and look back with today’s knowledge. Which is also a risk – the tendency of people to find unexpected events very predictable (and therefore avoidable) in hindsight is simply great.
The cabinet postponed its substantive responses to both reports, usually a sign that the researchers had hit their target. Now those responsible also have a backlog. They still need to be able to read and understand what went wrong and what their role was. Ideally, these are apolitical moments – when understanding advances and a new consensus forms. Then such a report can lead to a turnaround. Such a watershed is urgently needed after the three Marengo murders. After all, the questions arise. Can the Board of Prosecutors General and its chairman remain in office, given the established breach of contract? Has the prime minister’s best before date really passed, seen? hands off attitude in the raging gas crisis?
As far as the OVV report is concerned, the conclusion is that the logistics, information exchange and decision-making at the Public Prosecution Service and the police must be thoroughly reorganized when monitoring and protecting endangered persons. After the murders of a lawyer, a journalist and an innocent family member of a suspect, this conclusion was already there for the taking. The report paints a picture of highly conflicting interests, broken promises, missed details and miscommunication. Unfortunately, something like this fits official organizations that rely on protocols. And where the tasks are divided so minutely that no one has an overview or, even worse, is responsible for the result. With dramatic consequences for the threatened family, lawyer or spokesperson, who could be targeted unhindered. Security and investigation were so watertight that crucial information could not or should not be shared.
The top of the Public Prosecution Service is being harshly reproached for this and must really respond substantively in the coming weeks. The performance of chairman Gerrit van der Burg in News hour this week was not very hopeful in that respect: cumbersome, defensive and too little saying. Minister Yesilgöz (Justice, VVD) also received homework from the OVV that she should not ignore for too long. She should be particularly concerned about the long-term effects of the debacle these murders represent. The credibility of the Public Prosecution Service and the police as government organizations with which remorse can actually conclude criminal deals, if that were a good idea at all, has been damaged.
Who will work with a government organization that is unable to communicate information about threats to the responsible officials or very late? Who has outsourced the task to a network of official services, regional and national, in which the threatened persons themselves hardly have a position. With a government that ultimately considers detection more important than security? And an OM top who in concrete cases ‘thinks that security is in order’, which then turns out not to be the case?
In the meantime, Yesilgöz wants to expand the crown witness scheme, also to smaller cases. Purchasing criminal information more often in exchange for a reduced sentence, which of course already meets with objections from the constitutional state. But apart from that: this means that the Ministry of Justice wants to bind more people to be protected, who in many cases must also be made ‘untraceable’ within the Netherlands for revenge actions. Are the police and the Public Prosecution Service a sufficiently competent and reliable party to do business with? This report (and the three successful assassinations) shows that this is not the case now. That should lie like a stone in the stomach of the cabinet.
A version of this article also appeared in the March 4, 2023 newspaper