The Ministry of Health (VWS) remains committed to the alternative way in which it handles WOB requests about corona policy. The judge ruled last month that this method is not allowed.
Since the start of the corona crisis, the ministry itself determines when and which documents are published, while WOB requests actually have to be processed individually and within eight weeks. news hour filed a lawsuit because of that method.
in that case decided the judge three weeks ago that the ministry must indeed handle WOB requests individually. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is now appealing against that ruling, despite the fact that a majority of the House of Representatives Minister Hugo de Jonge called on to listen to the judge and not to make “parts” of information public.
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news hour made WOB requests in June 2020 on three topics: the consultation with the Outbreak Management Team, the corona app and research into the contagiousness of children. news hour been waiting for a response for over a year.
The court ruled that the requested documents must still be delivered within two months, on pain of an increased penalty. But the ministry says it will not be able to provide the documents so soon and is now requesting a preliminary injunction (a kind of summary proceedings) against the ruling.
Fifty extra lawyers
The department claims it is “practically impracticable” to release the documents within the legal two-month time limit and to deal with individual requests. In a letter to the House, the minister points out the millions of corona-related documents that must be “substantive assessment”.
“If all WOB requests were treated separately, so that each request had to go through the file of two million documents, this would lead to delays and fragmented publicity,” writes De Jonge.
VWS acknowledges that the alternative method does not run smoothly: “The assessment system has suffered from malfunctions in recent months, which means that the lawyers were unable to work as quickly.”
The ministry is hiring fifty extra lawyers to implement the current working method, which has therefore been declared controversial by the court.
Professor of constitutional law Wim Voermans calls the ministry’s response remarkable: “VWS is trying to place the bill for overdue maintenance with the WOB applicants. The ministry has hardly archived these documents or has not organized them in such a way that they could quickly make them available if that should.”
“Which library says to a visitor when they ask for a book, ‘Impossible! Do you know how many books we have here?’ Those volumes themselves mean nothing and are no excuse.”
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