The cabinet’s plans to combat radicalisation among young Dutch Muslims deal with the symptoms rather than the cause and infringe on privacy, the Dutch human rights commission said on Thursday.

The measures need to be revised to ensure that personal freedoms are not infringed upon, the commission says. Laws which conflict with human rights need to be ‘necessary and in proportion’, the commission says. This is missing from the current draft legislation which also fails to tackle the causes of radicalisation.

In addition, the legislation is vague about who it can be applied to, the commission says. The law states that measures which restrict freedom of movement or association can be imposed upon people who are considered to be a risk to national security or if ‘there are indications they may be joining a terrorist fighting force’, without being more explicit.

By anchoring the legislation in administrative rather than criminal law, the cabinet is also able to avoid the system of legal checks and balances to determine if the sanctions are justified, the commission points out.

While fully supporting the need to protect the Dutch people and democracy from terrorist violence, the measures the cabinet uses to achieve this must be in line with human rights standards, the commission says. ‘In these difficult times in particular, human rights must prove their worth.’