The State of the World's Human Rights; Netherlands 2025

Draft legislation would make it a criminal offence to be without valid residence papers. Protection against the use of discriminatory risk models in the benefits system remained inadequate. A draft bill criminalizing the “glorification of terrorism” threatened freedom of expression. Plans to criminalize psychological violence in domestic abuse situations were published.

Refugees’ and migrants’ rights

In July, a court serving the Caribbean countries and municipalities of the Kingdom of the Netherlands – the Joint Court of Justice of Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, and of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba – declared that the practice of automatically detaining refugees solely on the grounds of irregular entry was unlawful.

Two new policies introduced in Curaçao in March aimed to improve refugees’ and migrants’ rights, including by allowing undocumented individuals to apply for a residence permit on humanitarian and economic grounds. The practical impact of these improvements remained unclear at year’s end.

The Emergency Asylum Measures Bill, passed by the House of Representatives of the Netherlands in July, was designed to limit the number of asylum seekers in the country. The bill restricted family reunification for certain groups of refugees and denied refugees permanent residency after five years. In December, the bill was amended to criminalize people without valid residence papers. It had not been passed by the Senate by year’s end.¹

Discrimination

In August, in an interim judgment, a court ordered that the system used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to allocate short-stay visas should be subjected to a human rights impact assessment. The court referred to concerns raised by Amnesty International about the automated ethnic profiling used by the system’s algorithm. Protection against the use of such models in welfare fraud detection, policing and migration remained inadequate.

Freedom of expression

In June, the Ministry of Justice and Security proposed legislation criminalizing the “glorification of terrorism”. Under this bill, slogans, statements or symbols “associated with a terrorist group” would be punishable with up to three years in prison, regardless of the context. There were fears that the bill could criminalize permissible speech.

In July, the Ministry of Justice and Security proposed a bill to monitor public online platforms, a move which would allow the police to process personal data, including information about peaceful protesters.

Freedom of peaceful assembly

Parliament passed motions in support of curbing protest rights, including restrictions near commemorations, cost recovery resulting from civil disobedience, penalties for blocking infrastructure and expanded surveillance measures. The government commissioned independent reviews of these and related proposals which concluded that no additional legislation was necessary or would be effective.

In April, the government acknowledged that it had violated the right to protest of Extinction Rebellion activists by prohibiting them from protesting in specific areas, and offered them compensation.

In July, the Council of State ruled that so-called “administrative relocation” had been used unlawfully to disperse Extinction Rebellion protesters during a demonstration in 2020. The protesters had been moved by bus to a different location after they had ignored an order to leave.

Sexual and gender-based violence

In July, the State Secretary for Legal Protection unveiled plans to criminalize psychological violence as a separate offence in the context of domestic violence.

Right to a healthy environment

The Netherlands maintained its overall climate targets but implementation was problematic and climate polices had stagnated, according to the Climate Change Performance Index.

Corporate accountability

The Guardian newspaper uncovered evidence that Microsoft’s Netherlands-based data centres had been used by the Israeli military for surveillance and military targeting of Palestinians. In September 2025, following an investigation, Microsoft announced the termination of Israel’s Unit 8200’s access to certain Azure Cloud storage and AI services. However, at the end of the year it was unclear if Microsoft had investigated and terminated all contracts and products supplied to Israeli entities for involvement with potential violations against Palestinians.²

1. “Netherlands: Criminalization of people without valid papers is inhumane and impracticable”, 5 August (Dutch only) ↩︎
2. “Israel/IOPT: Microsoft’s move to block Israeli military unit’s access to its mass surveillance technology is a moment for corporate reckoning” 26 September ↩︎