Peter Rodrigues on ethnic profiling at Royal Netherlands Marechaussee
Victims of ethnic profiling have commenced legal proceedings against the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee. Peter Rodrigues, Professor of Immigration Law, says in a national newspaper that ethnicity may never be the most important criterion to stop and question a person and refers to a past ruling by the Supreme Court.
‘The official stance of the Marechaussee is that ethnicity is only one of the factors taken into account when stopping a person, but research has established that it is usually the decisive reason’, Rodrigues says, referring to the PhD thesis published last month by Jelmer Brouwer, former research at Leiden University, entitled ‘Detection, detention, deportation.’
Rodrigues does not believe that the Marechaussee will be less effective if ethnicity is prohibited as a selection criterion: ‘For a long time, the Netherlands is no longer a country where everyone is white and where coloured people come from elsewhere. This fact contributes to the huge negative impact of ethnic profiling because Dutch nationals who have dark skin colour feel that they are being discriminated against.’
Read the full article (in Dutch)