Two MPs have drawn up draft legislation aimed at banning the government from allowing ethnic profiling which they say will “not meet with much resistance” in parliament.

Discrimination based on skin colour and ethnicity should already be covered in the anti-discrimination paragraph of the constitution but recent scandals, including the child benefit scandal and the DUO grant scandal, have shown that ethnic profiling is still commonly used as a tool by government institutions.

NSC MP Willem Koops and D66 MP Mpanzu Bamenga said they were “convinced” the rest of the coalition would support the new legislation. “I have heard everyone say that there are no racists in the cabinet or the government, so I thought, great then this will sail through,” Koops told the NRC.

The draft legislation comes in the wake of a controversial motion from VVD parliamentarian Bente Becker which called on the cabinet to “record data about the cultural and religious norms and values of Dutch citizens with a migration background”. The NSC voted in favour, and D66 against.

“The motion was not formulated well,” Koops told the paper. The gist of the proposal was not to suggest “a secret, discriminating police force would be created to collect data about individuals who would then be dealt with in some way”, he said, but to see “how groups relate to each other”.

But Bamenga said the motion is a clear example of ethnic profiling. People are “continually seen as problematic because of their migration background”, Bamenga said.

The MP, who is from Congo, has first-hand experience of ethnic profiling. In 2023, he won a landmark case against the Dutch border police for selecting him for extra screening at passport control in 2018 on the basis of his skin colour. In court it emerged that the border guards at Eindhoven airport had picked him out because he looked like a “Nigerian money smuggler”.

A lower court had found that ethnic profiling was an acceptable form of border control, but Bamenga appealed, supported by a coalition of human rights groups including Amnesty International and Control Alt Delete. The court ruled that the border police had breached his rights under ECHR.

“It showed the system works – that I as an individual, supported by various human rights organisations, can hold the state to account. “But it also shows it should work better,” he told Dutch News at the time.

Koops, a lawyer, said the verdict, which expressly mentioned racial characteristics such as colour cannot play a role in checks, should now be anchored in law. “Policy is fluid, principles are not,” he told the paper.