Outgoing minister Hugo de Jonge (Public Health, Welfare and Sport) has won the audience prize of the annual Big Brother Award. He received the prize for biggest privacy violator for the way in which his ministry has introduced corona tickets.
A professional jury also awarded a Big Brother Award. It went to De Jonge’s colleague Grapperhaus (Justice and Security). According to the jury, the prize is “an oeuvre prize for a whole series of missteps committed by the Ministry of Justice and Security”.
The prize for the largest privacy violator in the Netherlands is an initiative of civil rights organization Bits of Freedom.
‘Infringement of fundamental rights’
According to Bits of Freedom director Evelyn Austin, De Jonge received the prize mainly because of the poor substantiation of the introduction of the corona pass. “The introduction of corona tickets is a violation of our fundamental rights, including the right to privacy,” Austin said.
“If you want to restrict fundamental rights, you must be able to substantiate why this is necessary, and provide the infringement with safeguards, such as clarity about the conditions and temporariness. The minister has not yet done that enough.”
Three politicians nominated
For the audience award, outgoing State Secretary Van Huffelen (Finance) was also nominated because of the allowance affair. Grapperhaus was also nominated for the public award for “secretly setting up a third secret service in the Netherlands, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV)”.
The prizes were not awarded last year due to the corona pandemic. In 2019, the audience award of the Big Brother Awards went to Minister Dekker (Legal protection) because of his plans with the Central Judicial Collection Agency. His ministry wants to link datasets together and use that data to create ‘payment profiles’ of people. The expert prize then went to System Risk Indication (SyRI), a controversial system used by the government to detect fraud.
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