Overvew of Dutch FOIA, Roger Vleugels - the Netherlands

In the Netherlands the FOIA started May 1980. The first 15 years this act was almost not noticed and was used just several hundred times. In the mid-nineties the amount of requests rose quickly to about 1000 a year on federal level. In 2004 it was 1042. A request is in 15% of the cases direct successful. This figure rises to 35% after an administrative appeal; to 65%
after a court appeal and to 75% after an appeal at the high court. Direct successful means after 1-2 month waiting, an administrative appeal costs 3-4-5 month and court appeal more than 1 year. 75% of the users of the Wob [Dutch FOIA] are journalists. Dutch culture causes that NGO like labour unions, civil right groups and environmental groups file almost no requests. The common opinion is that filing requests will harm their relation with the government. In the press at least ones a month there is a major disclosure based on the Wob. In the press the Wob is well known research tool. In spite of that the amount of actually filed requests is shameful.

National security and FOI
National security, including intelligence services and the so-called War on Terror, is an absolute exemption in the Dutch FOIA, and my speciality. I won more than 500 cases in spite of this exemption. Cases like: intelligence dossiers of by services registered persons, instructions for Dutch troops in Iraq, lots of documents on the Dutch troops about their role in the Srebrenica massacre, documents on home grown terror groups. The government is, using the terror threat, growing towards even more secretive kind of behaviour. For FOIA requests does this mean that more often appeals are needed and the formulating the requests becomes more difficult. More and more the crucial documents will not be disclosed, Filing requests on the paper trail can be a solution.

FOI and government contracts
Once a final signature is put on a contract it is accessible via the FOI, and not just the contract itself but also the contract proposal that did not finalize and the whole paper trail underlying on the whole operation. A growing problem is that in cases of PPP [public private partnership] the PPP-projectgroups tend to agree on a kind of confidentiality that sometimes
even in court can overrule the FOI [a kind of a lex specialist situation]. I am quit hopeful that documents on government subsidies, on building infrastructure, on major projects will stay accessible and that the use of confidentiality as illegal exemption will become less important.

FOI and personal data
Privacy was always a relative exemption in the Dutch FOIA. Starting September 2001 it is upgraded in a whole range of situations to an absolute exemption. This means that really personal data like police files, medical files and so on are only accessible for the person him/herself of family in the first degree. In medical cases I can agree, but in criminal cases not. Especially not in criminal cases dealt with by State Police. In those cases the public interest is more important than the private interest of the person[s] involved. The official government watchdog [CBP] has the same opinion as I have. So I hope within a few years to restore the situation before September 2001: Criminal files will be discloses after the criminal court finishes its job. FOI as a control tool afterwards.