Minister may remove telephone-tapped’s right to know

Justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin has told MPs he is considering scrapping the rule which says the security service has to inform people their telephones have been tapped after the tap has been removed.

In practice, those whose phones have been tapped are often hard to track down and there are enough other opportunities open to people to find out if their phone conversations have been listened into, the minister said.
Nor is there any requirement in European or human rights law to let people know their phones have been tapped.
Scrapping the requirement would also save the security services a considerable amount of work, the minister was reported as saying.
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The justice ministry authorised taps on 26,425 telephones in 2008, more than in any other country in the world. The figure does not include the number of taps operated by the security services, which is considered to be a state secret.
Unlike in many countries, the Netherlands allows the police to record all conversations made by crime suspects, including calls to their lawyers. Several court cases have come unstuck in recent years because officials have failed to destroy recordings of such conversations as they are supposed to by law.