People from outside Europe who come to the Netherlands to live, work, study or apply for asylum, automatically and without knowing it end up with their passport photo in a database of the police. According to experts, this is not allowed, and there is discrimination. This is evident from research by RTL News.
Those people end up in a photo database containing eight million facial photos of at least 6.5 million people who are registered in the aliens administration. These include expats, asylum seekers and foreign students who come to the Netherlands from outside the European Union. They are required to provide a passport photo upon entry, for example for their residence permit.
The photos are used in case a suspect is on screen, but his identity is unknown. The police are still trying to find out who it is via facial recognition.
Discrimination
Experts say against RTL News that the police are breaking the law. The millions of photos are placed next to another database containing 1.2 million photos of Dutch people and foreigners who have actually been identified by the police as suspects or who have been convicted of a criminal offence.
“With these two databases, the police treat foreigners the same as suspects,” said Fieke Jansen of Cardiff University, who is investigating the use of technology by the police. “Only because they came to the Netherlands from outside the European Union for work, study, a loved one or as a refugee. If they had done something wrong, they would have been in that other database.”
Evelien Brouwer, who works at Utrecht University as an expert on law, migration and technology, also believes that this is not possible. “The police stigmatize innocent expats, asylum seekers and students from outside Europe. They are treated the same as suspects in advance. This is discrimination.”
Permission
The police say that permission from the examining magistrate is required before the police can search the database. That happened in two cases last year. “We cannot and must not use it lightly,” said a spokesman.
The Ministry of Justice and Security points out that the police may use fingerprints from the aliens administration in investigations. Face photos should therefore also be used under the same conditions. Experts disagree.
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