The meeting at the police headquarters has just ended when Ben van Hoek starts talking with a colleague. The man says he worked at the Ministry of Justice and Security. Van Hoek also introduces himself: he coordinated the Wob requests at the police for years. “The Wob?” – the official laughs. Through this Government Information (Public Access) Act, journalists try to obtain all kinds of internal information, he says. But this official does not cooperate. “You sometimes forget a document, don’t you.”
It is typical of how many parts of the government think about transparency, says Van Hoek about his anecdote. According to the Wob lawyer, there is “large-scale obstruction” of the law that determines the public nature of government information.
Since the Allowances affair, in which information was withheld that was harmful to the tax authorities, the call for more transparent government has grown. Last month Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) got into trouble because he deleted almost all his text messages, making them no longer retrievable. It is in line with the working method of ministries and municipalities, says Van Hoek. “There is a culture of withholding.”
Ben van Hoek (65) was a data protection officer with the police force management until the end of April. He supervised compliance with the privacy rules. He retired last month after 44 years in the police force. He is participating in this interview because he wants the government to become more transparent.
Before Van Hoek became a privacy supervisor, he worked on major investigations. For the National Criminal Investigation Department, he coordinated an investigation into the IRT affair, an infiltration process that got out of hand in the 1990s, in which the police themselves traded drugs. He investigated construction fraud and fraud in the Rotterdam city hall, when former mayor Bram Peper was suspected of having private expenses paid by the municipality.
Resistance
In 2010, Van Hoek joined the legal affairs department of the police. From that moment on, he coordinated compliance with the Wob – which has since been transferred to the Open Government Act (Woo). Citizens and journalists can in principle request all government documents by invoking this law, unless there are good reasons to keep them secret. Politically sensitive Wob requests submitted to the police passed Van Hoek.
Within police units there was resistance to making documents public, he says. “Sometimes this was because they didn’t want certain things to come out, but in the vast majority of cases because they were afraid of the work involved in looking up documents. They preferred to spend that time catching crooks.”
Van Hoek visited all units to explain to managers that they should not see the Wob as extra work. “It is part of being accountable to the police. It’s part of our job.” The police will also benefit from it, says Van Hoek. For example, it was only after a Wob request that the high costs of farewell receptions became clear, after which a limit was set. “It saves the police tens of thousands of euros.”
If employees continued to refuse to provide Wob documents, Van Hoek switched to a different method. He asked the employees to sign a letter stating that the requested information was not in their possession. “Then those documents would be in my mailbox the same day.”
While the corps leadership supported him, Van Hoek experienced resistance outside the police organization. To his surprise, especially at ministries or municipalities, there was open discussion about the frustration of Wob requests and the ‘losing’ of sensitive documents.
The first time he experienced this was during a consultation at the Ministry of Justice and Security. RTL News filed a Wob request in 2018 in connection with the shot down MH17. “These were documents that were present at various ministries and the police – that’s why I was at that meeting. It was clear that many documents had not been provided. A top official from the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management made it clear during the consultation that we should not look for more documents. “This remains all,” he said. Everyone at the table knew: we are being cheated.”
Yet nobody intervened, says Van Hoek. Why didn’t he do anything himself? “The police provided everything. I had nothing to say about the ministries.”
bonfires
Another example took place in The Hague. In 2019 there was a Wob request from RTL at the Hague police about the bonfires in Scheveningen that had gotten out of hand. The unit found a document that was incriminating for then-mayor Pauline Krikke: she should have known that the bonfire could get out of hand.
Van Hoek, now national Wob coordinator, had to resolve the situation. He consulted with officials from the municipality of The Hague. “During that meeting, one of the officials suggested pretending the piece didn’t exist. “You don’t have to say you have that document, do you?” he said. I then made it clear to him that we don’t work like that. That a senior official is proposing this says a lot about the culture there.”
Van Hoek advised the police unit to publish the document in question. He was not involved in the further processing of the Wob request. It turned out afterwards that the unit chief had deleted all his apps about the bonfires. Krikke resigned in the fall of 2019 because of her role at the bonfires.
More recently, from his last position as a data protection officer, Van Hoek heard about a municipality withholding information. During the lockdown during the corona pandemic, camera trucks drove around in Rotterdam filming residents who did not comply with the corona rules, such as the one and a half meter rule. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) launched an investigation and concluded that the filming municipal cars violated the law: the invasion of privacy was too great.
The AP wanted to publish the outcome of the investigation at the end of last year to warn other municipalities that were planning the same. After consultation with mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb (PvdA), the police did not grant permission for early publication. As a result, the supervisor first had to embark on a lengthy process, in which, among other things, the amount of the fine will be determined. As a result, the report is still not public, but it has been seen by NRC†
“Aboutaleb tried to delay the investigation,” says Van Hoek. “In a meeting with the police, he said that the publication of the report should be delayed beyond the election.”
Internal mail traffic confirms his story. “Mayor proposes to raise it about the election,” a report from the triangular meeting on whether the police should agree to the publication of the report.
This report was withheld by the police in an earlier Wob request from NRC† An ‘incorrect assessment’ has been made in this regard, the Rotterdam police unit now says. According to the police, the content of her own report is incorrect. Not Aboutaleb, but the police chief would have said during the consultation that postponement means that the report can only be discussed by the new city council – after the elections. Aboutaleb himself does not want to respond to questions.
According to Van Hoek, the event shows how municipal authorities deal with transparency. “Preventing a publication because it is not convenient for the elections is not a motive that fits within a well-functioning democracy.”
The government does not comply with its own rules on transparency, he says. This undermines the authority and reliability of public administration. “Why should citizens still obey the law if the government doesn’t do it itself?”
Take Prime Minister Rutte’s recent comments about deleting his text messages, says Van Hoek. “Some of it may have been private, but there were guaranteed to be messages about political decision-making. Even if such a text only shows that the Prime Minister was informed about an issue, then that information must be kept by law.” Rutte is giving the wrong signal, he thinks. If the prime minister throws away too much, civil servants will also destroy information sooner in the event of a sensitive Wob request. “The obstruction of the law is thus further normalized. It is disastrous for trust in the government.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 16, 2022