SINT MAARTEN/THE NETHERLANDS – A medical student who shot dead his neighbour and her daughter before killing one of his teachers in a classroom has diminished responsibility as a result of an autism spectrum disorder, prosecutors told a court on Monday.

Fouad L., 33 is believed to have targeted his neighbour, Marlous, after she reported him to the housing association for abusing his pets, which resulted in a conviction for animal cruelty in 2021. L. shot the 39-year-old woman in her Rotterdam home along with her 14-year-old daughter, who opened the door to him, on September 28 last year.

He then went to the Erasmus Medical Centre teaching hospital and killed Jurgen Damen, 43, in front of his students. L. was studying medicine at Erasmus university, but had been declined a degree because of concerns about his mental health.

The university had asked him to undergo a psychiatric examination after being warned about him by the public prosecution department, but L failed to comply.

He wrote long posts on the networking site 4Chan in which he claimed that the staff at Erasmus teaching hospital were conspiring to prevent him from qualifying as a doctor.

Behavioural experts at the Pieter Baan Centrum, which assesses the mental health of criminal suspects, said L’s autistic condition was likely to have contributed to his actions and the court should rule his responsibility was impaired.

The centre recommended detaining L. in a secure hospital under a compulsory psychiatric treatment order. L, who is also charged with arson, threatening behaviour and possession of a firearm, was not present at the hearing.

Neighbours gathered at several locations in Rotterdam last week to commemorate the victims on the anniversary of the tragedy.

(DutchNews)

SINT MAARTEN/THE NETHERLANDS – The Netherlands will abstain from voting on controversial EU plans to screen messaging apps for images of child abuse, justice minister David van Weel told MPs on Tuesday.

Van Weel said the privacy implications of scanning messages shared through platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Signal over privacy concerns were too great.

EU justice minsters are due to vote on a proposal put forward by Hungary, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council, that would force platforms to install software to scan the encrypted messages for child pornography.

Van Weel said the amended plan did not go far enough to address concerns that privacy might be compromised. He added that the Dutch abstention means it is unlikely the proposal will become law when the vote takes place on October 11.

In a briefing to MPs, Van Weel said: “The Netherlands recognises the importance of combatting child pornographic material wholeheartedly.

“At the same time the cabinet thinks that too much remains unclear about the impact of the proposed measures.”

Risk of error

MPs and tech experts have long campaigned for a Dutch no-vote, arguing that not enough is known about how a scan would work.

The software to carry out the scan has not yet been developed and because of heavy messaging traffic even a small margin of error could lead to many people being falsely accused of disseminating indecent images of children.

GroenLinks-PvdA MP Barbara Kathmann, who called the proposal a dangerous “form of mass surveillance” welcomed the decision, although she would have preferred a no-vote.

“The blocking minority in the EU is standing its ground,” she told broadcaster NOS.

(DutchNews)

SINT MAARTEN/THE NETHERLANDS – Philips ignored or suppressed a series of studies that revealed problems with its sleep apnea devices as early as 2016, according to documents filed with a court in the US.

Independent laboratory PSN Labs claimed that the Amsterdam-based electronics giant failed to heed internal warnings about polyester noise cancelling foam used in its ventilators.

PSN Labs also accused the company of failing to notify US health authorities, such as the Food and Drug Administration, of the results of tests carried out by external laboratories.

In 2021 Philips recalled 15 million devices that used polyester foam to dampen the noise after it was found to have degraded during cleaning. More than 1,000 patients in the Netherlands and some 60,000 in the US are suing the company for health problems that they say were caused by the Dreamstation devices.

Some 70 patients in the Netherlands claim they developed cancer as a result of inhaling particles of foam that came loose during cleaning. Philips says independent tests have shown there is no link between the machines and cancer.

The company is suing PSN Labs for mistakes the laboratory allegedly made when Philips commissioned it to carry out a risk assessment of its sleep apnea devices.

“Egregious errors”

Philips says it would have “pursued a different and more focused recall” if PSN had not made “numerous egregious errors” and “greatly overestimated the potential threat to patients”.

But PSN Labs, in its 50-page submission to the court in Pittsburgh, said it had not been shown 14 critical internal reports about the polyester foam, according to a report in NRC. It claimed it had been put under pressure to produce a report that played down the health risks.

The laboratory accused Philips of covering up its mistakes by hiding test results and “selectively” citing reports with favourable outcomes, in order to “minimalise significant risks” and “hide them from the public and regulatory authorities”.

(DutchNews)

SINT MAARTEN/THE NETHERLANDS – Ministers have reversed a decision to grant asylum to a group of 200 Afghan security guards who were working for the Dutch embassy in Kabul when the city fell to the Taliban.

The staff were not eligible for asylum immediately after the evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021 because they were working for external agencies rather than directly for the Dutch government.

The previous cabinet agreed to grant asylum to them and their families,. But on Friday foreign affairs minister Caspar Veldkamp, defence minister Ruben Brekelmans and asylum minister Marjolein Faber said in a letter to parliament that they had made a “different assessment” of the circumstances.

Opposition parties condemned the decision, with GroenLinks-PvdA foreign affairs spokeswoman Kari Piri calling it “heartless and enraging”, while D66 MP Jan Paternotte said it was “beyond shameful” and called for parliament to intervene.

Veldkamp is a minister for Nieuw Sociaal Contact (NSC), whose leader, Pieter Omtzigt, was highly critical of the way the Dutch government selected people for evacuation in the aftermath of the fall of Kabul three years ago.

In a parliamentary committee hearing in October 2021, Omtzigt drew parallels with the interpreters at Srebrenica who were denied access to the compound and fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995.

Women’s rights

Last week the Netherlands was one of four countries that announced at the UN in New York that they were bringing a case against Afghanistan at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for violating women’s rights. Veldkamp described the situation of women and girls in the country as “heartbreaking”.

Refugee agency Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland said the decision was “heartless” and left the interpreters in limbo. “After spending years in hiding and uncertainty, this decision has been taken for them and left them with nowhere to go,” the charity said.

Altogether the Dutch government flew 1,860 people out of Afghanistan in the initial phase of the evacuation in August 2021, with another 2,810 following later. The government is still finalising arrangements for the last 64 evacuees, the ministers said on Friday.

(DutchNews)