On March 5, 2025, the Advisory Division of the Council of State adopted the information on the extension of the retention period of police data for the purpose of investigating cold cases. The information was published on the website of the Council of State on March 10, 2025.
The Minister of Justice and Security has asked the Advisory Division for information. He wants to know what the preconditions are for retaining data collected by the police in the performance of their daily police duties for decades. These data are collected under Article 8 of the Police Data Act (Wpg) and are also called Article 8 police data. The police want to keep these data so that they can be used later, if necessary, for the investigation of cold cases. This is a very large amount of very different data. Think of the registration of a neighbor's quarrel, a report by the neighborhood cop on the daily surveillance round or the handling of a traffic case. In principle, the data can relate to anyone in the Netherlands. To a large extent, it concerns information about persons who are not suspected of a criminal offense. It does not concern information that has been collected specifically for the purpose of solving criminal cases and is therefore included in a criminal file.
By law, this Article 8 police data must be deleted after five years and destroyed after 10 years. In 2019, the chief of police, with the consent of the minister and with the knowledge of the House of Representatives, decided not to destroy this type of police data. According to the chief of police, the retention periods included in the Wpg are too short for investigations in cold cases. Since then, therefore, the data have been kept indefinitely.
When answering the question of how long Article 8 police data may be kept, a balancing of interests must be made. In this, the interest of solving cold cases plays a role along with the interest of protecting private life. According to the minister, Article 8 police data can be supportive in the investigation of cold cases, but they are not decisive in this. Concrete figures on the frequency of use of these data for solving cold cases are lacking. Therefore, the need for extending the retention period for this type of data cannot be easily demonstrated. At the same time, the long retention period does result in a far-reaching infringement of the rights to the protection of private life and personal data. That infringement becomes greater if the retention period becomes longer. The Advisory Division concludes on the basis of the Constitution, the ECHR and the EU Charter that retaining all Article 8 police data for several decades for the purpose of investigating cold cases is not proportionate.
Finally, the Advisory Division points out that it does not consider it acceptable that at present, with the consent of the Minister, the retention periods of the law are deliberately exceeded. This situation should therefore be ended as soon as possible. Looking to the future, she considers it desirable that the system of the Police Data Act and the Judicial and Criminal Records Act be thought through, as the minister previously announced. Even in a new system, a retention period is an important safeguard for the protection of private life and personal data.
