Fatma Çapkurt is an Assistant Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the Faculty of Law of Leiden University. She completed her doctoral dissertation at this faculty in 2024, which focused on the organization of legal protection against data processing by public authorities. Currently, Çapkurt serves as a member of the Amsterdam Data Protection Commission of the Municipality of Amsterdam and the Police Ethical Advisory Board. Between 2023 and 2024, she was a member and Deputy Chair of the State Commission on the Rule of Law.

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Fatma Çapkurt (1994) studied law in Tilburg, Leuven, and Paris. After graduating, she began working as a teaching and research associate in the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at Leiden University. In her doctoral dissertation, Çapkurt examined the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on Dutch administrative procedural law. The central question addressed in her dissertation is how administrative legal protection is organized against the processing of personal data by administrative authorities. Particular attention is devoted to the ways in which citizens can challenge such data processing through administrative law. The commercial edition of her dissertation will be published in December 2024.

Since 2022, Çapkurt has been a member of the Amsterdam Data Protection Commission (Commissie Persoonsgegevens Amsterdam, CPA). The CPA advises the Amsterdam municipal executive (college van B&W) on policies concerning the protection of personal data, algorithms, data ethics, and human rights issues related to digitalization. Its advice is grounded in three pillars: law, ethics, and technology. The CPA may issue both solicited and unsolicited advice. Since 2024, Çapkurt has also served as a member of the Police Ethical Advisory Board. This body is tasked with providing an external perspective to assist the police in making careful considerations in the exercise of their duties and in addressing the moral questions that arise in that context. In particular, the Advisory Board devotes explicit attention to new ethical questions raised by the police’s use of information technologies, such as algorithms, artificial intelligence, big data, and sensors.

In 2024, the civil society coalition Over informatie gesproken awarded Çapkurt and Professor Anne Meuwese a grant to conduct research on the profiling of citizens in the field of social security. In recent years, it has become clear that citizens have often been profiled primarily for repressive purposes. Examples include the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (Toeslagenaffaire) and the case concerning DUO’s verification of student housing grants (Controle Uitwonenden Beurs). Research is still ongoing into the precise consequences of such profiling for individual citizens. What has already become apparent, however, is that this practice has produced a transparency paradox: while citizens became increasingly transparent to government authorities, those same authorities failed to provide them with information about why and how their personal data were being processed for profiling purposes. The research conducted by Meuwese and Çapkurt focuses specifically on profiling in the field of social security. By examining two different informational practices of algorithmic profiling from both an empirical and a legal perspective, the project aims to enhance knowledge of the state of the art in this area among public authorities, legal scholarship, and the broader public.

Between 2023 and 2024, Çapkurt was a member of the State Commission on the Rule of Law (Staatscommissie Rechtsstaat). This Commission was tasked with analyzing the functioning of the rule of law and formulating proposals for its reinforcement. On 10 June 2024, it presented its advisory report—The Broken Promise of the Rule of Law—to citizens as well as to the three branches of government.

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