Lawyers are calling to an end to the practice of keeping people arrested on Friday, Saturday or Sunday in police cells until Monday morning, saying there are no legal grounds to keep them locked up.

The Friesian towns of Leeuwarden and Sneek last week agreed to introduce the ‘weekend-away’ lock-up, which already operates in Tilburg and Amersfoort. The towns hope they can crack down on city centre violence by keeping people – often arrested for drink-related offences – in jail.
‘The practice may come over tough but there is no legal basis for it,’Tjalling van der Goot, of Leeuwarden law firm Anker & Anker told the Volkskrant.
The national ombudsman has already criticised the scheme. ‘People arrested for trivial offences should not automatically be locked up for three nights,’ the paper quotd a spokesman for the ombudsman as saying.