Passport photos of at least 6.5 million foreigners who come to the Netherlands end up in the police database, despite the fact that they have not committed a criminal offense, according to RTL Nieuws. The experts who spoke to the news medium doubt whether this is legal.
It concerns people who are registered in the aliens administration. This includes expats, asylum seekers and foreign students who do not come from the European Union. The passport photos that they are required to take upon arrival appear in this database. According to RTL Nieuws this is happening without them knowing.
The police have legal permission to store the fingerprints of the aliens administration in a database, so the Ministry of Justice and Security believes that this also applies to facial photos. However, this is not specifically stated in the law. “Faces are really not the same as fingerprints. It is problematic that the ministry sees it that way,” Heleen Janssen, lecturer in information law at the University of Amsterdam, told RTL Nieuws. ‘Other legal experts’ who spoke to the site also question the legality of this database, as well as the Dutch Data Protection Authority.
The database can be used to determine the identity of suspects with the facial recognition tool Catch, although that only with the permission of the examining magistrate. That happened twice last year, a spokesperson told RTL Nieuws. The database is used in addition to a database with passport photos of 1.2 million Dutch citizens and foreigners who have actually committed a criminal offence. According to sources spoken to by RTL Nieuws, this would mean that the 6.5 million foreigners are treated as criminals, which is discrimination and therefore prohibited.
