Senay Boztas

Dutch descend into curfew chaos

(Photo by Sabine van Wechem/Getty Images)

Police were ready and supermarkets closed their doors, but on Tuesday evening it was unclear if a controversial curfew in the Netherlands would be respected. Earlier in the day, a court ruled that the legal basis for the curfew was invalid: it rests on a particular type of emergency ruling when instead it should have gone to a vote in the lower house.

This was, ruled the court in the Hague, ‘absolutely not’ the kind of situation for which the emergency law was intended, such as the breach of a dyke. Meanwhile, the court said the 9 p.m. to 4.30 a.m. curfew, which sparked nationwide hooliganism and riots after it was introduced in late January, constituted an ‘extreme breach’ of freedoms enshrined in Dutch law. 

Willem Engel, chairman of a virus sceptic group now called Viruswaarheid (virus truth) which brought the case, told the broadcaster NOS that he expected people to be ‘out merrymaking’ in the streets. But as the government started emergency court action to see whether the curfew could remain in force until an appeal could be mounted — or possibly a new law passed — the broader repercussions were unclear. Then, just minutes before 9 p.m., the government successfully won an order to keep the curfew in force until its appeal is heard on Friday — while it is now also trying to push a new type of curfew law through both houses of parliament. Still, the broader repercussions of the legal win are crystallising.

Critics of the government said that it was a sign that the ‘caretaker’ government, made up of the ministers who formally stepped down in January over a long-running childcare benefits scandal, were incompetent and riding roughshod over constitutional freedoms. But other experts on voting behaviour and economic analysts were unsure this would change the results of upcoming March elections, for which the most likely outcome is a victory for caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

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