Passport photos which foreigners from outside the EU have to supply to the immigration service are automatically included in a massive police database without their knowledge, RTL Nieuws reported at the weekend.

Hundreds of thousands of photographs of expats, students and family members from non-EU countries have been stored in the facial recognition data base, despite questions about its legality, RTL said.

In total, the database has some eight million photos of at least 6.5 million foreign nationals and the collection has been built up over a number of years.

Human rights and immigration law experts told RTL that the police are breaking the law by keeping photographs of innocent people on file. The police also operate another database with 1.2 million photos of people, both Dutch and foreign nationals, who are crime suspects or who have convictions.

The police are only allowed to access the database of photos of foreigners with the permission of a judge and that happened twice in 2022, a police spokesman told RTL. ‘This shows how restrained we are in using it,’ the spokesman said.

Nevertheless, foreign workers and students told RTL they were not aware their photographs were being placed in a police database and that they felt the move was discriminatory.

Stigmatising

‘The police are stigmatising innocent expats, asylum seekers and students from outside Europe,’ Evelien Brouwer from the University of Utrecht said. ‘They are being treated in the same way as suspects and that is discrimination.’

The Dutch privacy watchdog AP said it has doubts about the legality of the system and last week, the European Court said that such police databases are only legal if they have been properly anchored in law.

The police spokesman told RTL that the police do not need a database with everyone’s photo in it, and there is no legal grounds to have one.

‘So why do they have a database of photos of foreigners, a group with a higher percentage of people of colour than the general Dutch population?’ privacy expert Koen Vermissen told Nu.nl.

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