Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) has violated the Archives Act by deleting messages on his phone every day for years. That will be revealed on Monday investigation by the Government Information and Heritage Inspectorate. The Archives Act prescribes which correspondence administrators must keep, among other things in order to be able to explain to the public why certain (political) choices have been made.
Last May, the state attorney, in a lawsuit brought by de Volkskrant, that Rutte used an old Nokia device with little storage space. That’s why he practiced ‘real-time archiving’: he decided for himself which text messages should be deleted and kept. He would have forwarded the saved messages to officials.
After the news, Rutte had to give an explanation in the House of Representatives. In the ‘texting debate’ he insisted that he had obeyed the law. By his own account, he’d forwarded every substantive message to his officials, and if his Nokia couldn’t handle the forwarding, for long text messages, he’d relayed the content in a phone call.
Also read: Text messages from Prime Minister Rutte made public for the first time
Data loss
In its investigation, the Inspectorate concludes that the Prime Minister has complied with the so-called ‘government-wide instruction’ for the storage of chat messages, but that this instruction is not in line with the Archives Act. According to the Inspectorate, both Rutte and his officials did not act in accordance with this law, because Rutte did not forward all his messages to his officials and they subsequently made a “too strict selection”. In addition, the way Rutte forwarded his messages led to data loss, because, for example, it was no longer possible to see when the original messages had been sent or received.
The Inspectorate was unable to determine how often Rutte’s chat messages were unlawfully not archived and of what nature they were. After all, many messages have been deleted.
The Inspectorate writes that the problems with archiving do not only affect Rutte’s ministry (General Affairs), but also several ministries. She believes that the cabinet should adjust the ‘government-wide instruction’ so that it is in line with the Archives Act.