Dozens of fines for breaching coronavirus rules during the lockdown period could lapse in the next few months because prosecutors have been swamped with appeals.

The public prosecution office’s central processing division CVOM received 12,000 formal challenges to fines issued between March 2020 and March 2022, some 7,000 of which are still in the queue to be assessed.

Another 4,000 objections have been reviewed and are ready to go to court, but in 70% of cases a date still needs to be set for a hearing before a judge.

A three-year legal time limit applies to the fines, after which prosecutors are no longer able to bring the case to court. Some 270 of the contested fines were issued in 2020, meaning they will expire during the course of this year.

The vast majority of the outstanding penalties, a total of 6,938, were issued in 2021, mostly for failing to observe the evening curfew that was in force from late January until the end of April. Another 100 disputed fines were issued in 2021.

Senior prosecutor Achilles Damen told EenVandaag there was no question of the fines being written off. ‘It’s about standards,’ he said. ‘We thought it was important at the time and that’s still the case.

‘Thousands of cases sounds like a lot to many people, but we’re set up to deal with large numbers of cases.’

Damen added that the appeals would be carefully considered to ensure justice was done both to those who were fined and the enforcement agencies that had the job of issuing them.

‘People were confronted with the criminal law for something that is usually quite normal. You’d go for a walk around the block and suddenly it wasn’t allowed.

‘Some of them responded with extensive legal objections that the government was not authorised to restrict their constitutional rights. Those are the most serious cases from a legal point of view.’

Altogether 180,000 fines were handed out by police and local government enforcement teams during the two years of the ‘one and a half metre society’, most of which have been paid off.

The fines were initially set at €390, which meant those who paid them also acquired a criminal record, but were reduced to €95 in September 2020. The decision came shortly after photographs were published of the then justice minister, Ferd Grapperhaus, ignoring social distancing rules and hugging his mother-in-law at his wedding.