‘If the information collected by the police, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security offices, the health care system and other agencies were to be gathered into a single file, the freedom of the individual would be seriously endangered. The file of private information is the emblem of the totalitarian state.’
– Baron Browne-Wilkinson, former vice president of the English Supreme Court, 1991
SyRI is a risk profiling system, used by the Dutch government, that linked and analyzed large amounts of personal data on citizens. For example, data on identity, employment, movable and immovable property, education, retirement, business, income and assets, pension and debts. And the list did not end there. SyRI, a tool that was based on Article 64 and Article 65 of the SUWI Act, was used to prevent and combat the abuse of social security benefits, prevent and combat tax and contribution fraud, and non-compliance with labor laws.
The profiling of citizens by SyRI led to risk reports: so-called “wonder addresses” with an increased risk of fraud. These people were included in a register and could then be subjected to criminal and administrative investigations and sanctions. Every resident of the Netherlands was “a priori suspicious” to the government through SyRI.
The lawsuit against SyRI
In 2014, a coalition of civil society organizations and authors Tommy Wieringa and Maxim Februari, under the coordination of PILP, started a strategic lawsuit on SyRI against the Dutch State. With this lawsuit, they wanted to put a stop to SyRI. The way the government used SyRI to deploy large amounts of data against its citizens was unprecedented, undemocratic and had serious human rights concerns. Learn more about these proceedings under “Related Lawsuits” to the right.
Although the passage of the law that made SyRI possible in 2014 had passed relatively quietly, the debate over the legality of the system swelled after the lawsuit was announced. The deployment of SyRI in two neighborhoods in Rotterdam-Zuid led to protests among residents and discussion in the city council in early 2019. Not much later, Mayor Aboutaleb pulled the plug on the research; the municipality and the ministry could not agree on the legal basis. In June 2019, the Volkskrant revealed that SyRI had not detected a single fraudster since its introduction. In October 2019, UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston wrote in a critical amicus curiae (a letter as a “friend of the judge”) to the court expressing profound doubts about the legality of SyRI. He said the court case against SyRI was of international importance on the use of digital technologies in a welfare state and its impact on the rights of the most vulnerable citizens. The UN rapporteur’s involvement was much in the news, for example on Nieuwsuur. In late November 2019, SyRI won the Expert Prize of the Big Brother Awards.
Read more?
The Digital Freedom Fund supported the SyRI trial and wrote a casenote about it. Merel Hendrickx of PILP and Tijmen Wisman of Platform Protection of Civil Rights wrote a blog together and PILP colleague Nawal Mustafa wrote an article about the SyRI case, among others, for the Digital Freedom Fund website.
Also The Correspondent, The New York Times, NRC Trouw, RTL News, FD, Telegraaf, The Guardian, Privacy International, NOS, Volkskrant paid attention to the SyRI proceedings.
Maxim February and Tommy Wieringa joined the Beau talk show and Tommy Wieringa warned about SyRI in his Kousbroek lecture.
