A judge from the North Holland district court has submitted Open Government Act (Woo) requests to every municipality in the Netherlands — a campaign that, by the sheer number of recipients, amounts to thousands of individual filings. According to reporting by investigative platform Follow the Money, the judge's actions were intended to draw attention to what the judge perceives as systemic "abuse" of the transparency statute. Local officials, however, have pushed back, claiming the judge was "only busy with forcing the law" rather than pursuing reform through standard institutional channels.
The episode places an unusual actor — a sitting judge — at the center of a debate that has simmered in Dutch administrative law for years. The Open Government Act, known by its Dutch abbreviation Woo, replaced the older Wet openbaarheid van bestuur (Wob) and was designed to make government information more accessible by default. Since its introduction, municipalities and national agencies have grappled with implementation, balancing the public's right to information against the administrative burden of processing requests.
A judge on the other side of the counter
What makes this case unusual is not the volume of requests — serial Woo filings are a known phenomenon — but the identity of the filer. Judges in the Netherlands ordinarily encounter transparency disputes from the bench, adjudicating whether a government body has lawfully refused or delayed disclosure. For a member of the judiciary to step into the role of requester, and to do so at national scale, blurs a line that Dutch legal culture has traditionally kept clear. The move raises questions about the boundaries of judicial conduct outside the courtroom and whether a judge's professional standing lends undue weight — or credibility — to what is formally a citizen's right available to anyone.
Critics within municipal government appear to view the campaign less as whistleblowing and more as a form of procedural provocation. The complaint that the judge was "only busy with forcing the law" suggests that local administrators see the requests not as genuine information-seeking but as a stress test imposed without consultation. That framing echoes a broader grievance: smaller municipalities, often operating with limited legal and administrative staff, have long argued that high-volume Woo requests — regardless of who files them — can paralyze day-to-day operations.
Transparency law under structural pressure
The tension is not unique to the Netherlands. Freedom-of-information regimes across Europe and North America face a recurring paradox: the laws exist to ensure accountability, yet their mechanisms can be turned into instruments of disruption, whether by activists, commercial data harvesters, or individuals with grievances against specific agencies. Legislators periodically attempt to distinguish good-faith requests from abusive ones, but drawing that line without undermining the statute's purpose has proven difficult in every jurisdiction that has tried.
In the Dutch context, the Woo was partly intended to address this problem by shifting government culture toward proactive disclosure — publishing information before anyone needs to ask. Progress on that front has been uneven. When proactive disclosure lags, the request mechanism absorbs the pressure, and debates about "abuse" intensify.
The judge's campaign, whatever its procedural merits, has succeeded in surfacing a structural question that administrative reform alone has not resolved: if the system cannot handle the volume of requests its own statute permits, is the problem the requester or the system? Municipal officials and judicial ethics bodies may reach different answers. The Dutch Council for the Judiciary, which oversees standards of judicial conduct, could face pressure to clarify whether a sitting judge's extrajudicial activism of this kind falls within acceptable bounds — or whether it risks compromising the appearance of impartiality that the bench depends on.
Both forces now sit in open tension. Transparency advocates will see a judge willing to demonstrate, through lived experience, that the system is broken. Municipal administrators will see a member of the judiciary exploiting the very dysfunction that lands on their desks. Which reading prevails may depend less on the merits of the Woo requests themselves than on whether Dutch institutions treat this as a governance problem or a disciplinary one.
With reporting from NRC — Tech.
Source · NRC — Tech
