News item | 11-07-2025 | 15:00
Enforcers and care providers must be able to do their work safely and unhindered and it is unacceptable if they are confronted with aggression and violence, they cannot resign if they are confronted with violence during their work. A community service is therefore not an appropriate punishment for mistreatment of persons responsible for providing acute help or with the actual enforcement of the legal order. The Minister of Justice and Security therefore brings an amendment to the Criminal Code in consultation in order to expand the community service prohibition on a number of bottlenecks found in legal practice. The government recognizes the dilemmas that play a role in the definition of the groups it concerns. For example, a distinction between acute care providers and investigating officers could be made. That is why in this consultation round, the government invites everyone to explicitly give visions of this scope.
With this proposal, 4 changes are made to the community service prohibition:
- The prohibition of community service is extended to mistreatment of enforcers and care providers who are responsible for providing acute help or the actual enforcement of the legal order. These people operate in the front line and cannot take a step back if they have to deal with violence, because it can endanger the health and safety of others. That is why abuse of these persons is charged the perpetrator more heavily than comparable violence against other persons.
- The law explicitly stipulates that, where the prohibition of community service applies, no fine can be imposed. This removes the lack of clarity about this in practice.
- A hardness clause is introduced, so that in exceptional cases the judge may deviate from the community service prohibition on recidivism. At the moment, no community service may be imposed on persons who, within five years after the performance of community service, are again convicted of a similar crime. With this change, the judge is given the opportunity within strict limits to impose a community service in that situation. This hardness clause only applies to relatively lighter facts with recidivism, such as stealing a bottle of coke. In the event of serious violent and sex offenses, the community service prohibition cannot be deviated from in the future either.
- It will be possible to impose a community service sentence if it is combined with a whole or partial conditional prison sentence. At the moment, under the community service prohibition, a community service sentence can only be combined with a completely unconditional prison sentence. Because of this change, the court will have more options for applying customization in an individual case to the punishment. In some cases, the imposition of a longer conditional prison sentence (for example in the form of an area or contact ban) in combination with a community service is more meaningful than an unconditional prison sentence of, for example, one day in combination with a community service sentence. Naturally, the imposition of a bare community service is impossible in these cases.
Minister Van Weel: “Ambulance personnel that are pelted with fireworks and agents who get stones to their heads: it is absolutely unacceptable that these people are confronted with the abuse while they are concerned with the safety and health of all of us. A community service is not an appropriate punishment for perpetrators who have been guilty of this kind of cowardly depletion of the tasks and the tasks and the tasks of the tasks and enforcers is unacceptable. ”
Current ban on community service
The Criminal Code currently states that no community service may be imposed for certain offenses by the court, except in combination with an unconditional prison sentence. This is called the ‘community service prohibition’. The community service prohibition applies, for example, when there is a crime for which a prison sentence of 6 years or more applies and the violence has led to a serious infringement of the physical integrity of the victim, such as arson, abuse with serious injury, and murder. The community service prohibition has been established because a community service is not seen as an appropriate punishment for these types of offenses.