News item | 06-12-2024 | 4:15 PM
Minister Eppo Bruins of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) is introducing a change in the law to make it possible for the Central Archives for Special Legal Affairs (CABR) to become fully accessible online to a wide audience. The minister postpones the planned online opening of this war archive on January 2, 2025 after a warning letter from the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP).
The CABR is the largest and most consulted archive on the Second World War in the Netherlands. The archive contains files of people who were suspected of collaboration with the German occupier after the Second World War. The minister will enter into discussions with the AP to see how the National Archives can provide access to the digitized archive for the period from January 2 until the law is changed.
Minister Bruins: “I regret the postponement because it is of great social importance that this war archive quickly becomes fully public and accessible online. This makes it possible for the first time for relatives of victims to find information about the fate of their family. To keep the memory of the Second World War alive, it is important to offer Dutch people access to this information in an accessible way. Openness of archives is important for surviving relatives, science, education and in this case also in the fight against anti-Semitism. This archive is a silent witness to the Holocaust.”
The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science received the letter from the AP on November 26. The AP’s view has major consequences for the entire archive sector when it comes to the digital availability and accessibility of archives, because archives almost always contain personal data. With a legislative amendment to the existing Archives Act, the minister wants to offer the opportunity to weigh up the interests between publicity and privacy when providing (special and criminal) personal data by archive services. That is not possible at the moment.
Already limited public
The war archives are now only publicly available to a limited extent. Scientists and relatives of a suspect have been able to access it in the reading room of the National Archives (NA) for decades, under certain conditions. They can now only search based on the names of suspects. The AP warns in a letter about the risks it sees in making the CABR accessible online. According to the AP, an environment that is accessible to everyone with text searchability can lead to privacy violations for living people involved and it considers this unlawful. That is why the online accessibility of the CABR is postponed for the time being.
According to the AP, a legal basis can be created in the Archives Act. That is why the minister is introducing an amendment to the law that provides a basis for the processing of special, criminal and ordinary personal data that have been kept for archiving purposes.
Project War for the Judge
In 2022, the National Archives started the War for the Judge project in a consortium with the Huygens Institute, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and WO2net. The aim is to digitize the CABR, make it searchable in full-text, provide context and make it accessible online. This makes the war archive much more accessible and allows research to be conducted in other ways. From January 2, 2025, the first 25 percent of the files can be found via warvoorderechter.nl. That will not happen for the time being.
Small number of living persons
Many discussions were held with various interest groups for this project. Both with relatives of victims (CJO, COVVS) and relatives of suspects (SWH). In consultation with them, measures have been taken to limit the disclosure of personal data of the small number of living people as much as possible. For example, suspect files would only be placed online if there is evidence of death.
This is not possible for victims and other third parties who appear in suspect files. This information can only be taken offline upon request. In addition, the archive is not made searchable and indexable for search engines such as Google. Content context is added to the archive online to better inform people about the contents of files.