On September 6th, the permanent Committee on Finance of Dutch Parliament deliberated on the legislative proposals that should be declared controversial or not, considering the upcoming elections. Controversial legislation will not be treated until after the elections.
The foundation Human Rights in Finance.EU called on the Committee to declare the proposals or the money laundering action plan controversial, as those include elaborate rules on a private public partnership that does mass surveillance of all transactions of citizens. We explained that this is not really in line with current EU thinking as presented by the European Data Protection Board in May 2023.
The setting up of public-private partnerships (“PPPs”) aiming to allow private parties (i.e. the obliged entities) to monitor subjects (i.e. their customers), on the basis of operational information provided by law enforcement authorities, and possibly related to ongoing law enforcement investigations, would entail significant risks from a data protection perspective.6 In particular, the EDPB recalls that the combatting of crime is in essence a public task and that the allocation of the said task to private enterprises or PPP’s should be strictly limited and thoroughly scrutinized. From a privacy and data protection perspective, limiting the flow of information from obliged entities to public authorities constitutes a safeguard for individuals. Therefore, the processing operation concerning information on possible offences arising from the reported suspicious transactions should be, in principle, limited to public authorities, given their sensitive nature and their impact on the fundamental rights of the concerned individuals.
UPDATE: The decision list now shows that the permanent committee did indeed heed this call. That is satisfactory.
