Taubah Mosque Ruling: A Dutch Mosque Pushes Back on the Surveillance of Muslims

Earlier this year I attended a session of the Dutch District Court of Midden-Nederland of the Taubah mosque vs the municipality of the Dutch town of Veenendaal. The case concerned the Taubah Mosque — a local religious institution that, like many across Europe, found itself under secret scrutiny by its own municipality. It was a blast.

In July 2025, the District Court of Midden-Nederland handed down a decision that could reverberate far beyond the Dutch town of Veenendaal. The ruling, registered as ECLI:NL:RBMNE:2025:4036, declared that Veenendaal’s covert investigation into the mosque and the broader Muslim community was unlawful, violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and breached basic principles of good governance. The municipality had hired a private firm, NTA, to map potential radicalisation risks without properly informing those being monitored and with no oversight. The resulting report included names, photographs, and detailed personal information, and was shared with national ministries and intelligence services.

The court’s language was unusually direct: there was no legal basis for the operation, and no justification for the manner in which sensitive data had been collected and distributed. Veenendaal must now disclose exactly who received the report and faces a financial penalty if it fails to comply. The municipality has always refused to do so, citing reasons of privacy, which was one of the reasons the mosque decided to go to court. As statement by the chairman of the mosque in April:

“The Veenendaal Islamic community has lost confidence in the municipality. We want to restore trust, but then the municipality must first clean up and give us access to the entire report.”

For human rights advocates and privacy lawyers, this was more than a procedural victory. It was a rare and explicit rejection of a surveillance logic that has been quietly normalised across much of Europe for more than two decades. It also signals a broader trend of Muslim organisations seeking justice and equality through Dutch law as Maurits Berger explains. In this blogpost I will situate the secret investigations and the court case in the context of (talking back to) Islamophobia and surveillance.

From 9/11 to Veenendaal: How Surveillance Became Routine In Europe

To understand the weight of this ruling, we have to go back to 2001. Building on already existing tropes of dangerous Muslims (partly based on ideas about Palestinian resistance) the 9/11 attacks in the United States were instrumentalized for a security transformation across the Western world. European governments rapidly passed counter-terrorism laws, often drafted in haste and with little debate about civil liberties. In broad strokes, the timeline looks something like this:

2001–2004: The global securitisation turn

• Attacks of 11 September 2001 against the US lead to sweeping anti-terror legislation in Europe and elsewhere.
• 2004: Theo van Gogh murder prompts intensified monitoring of Muslim communities in the Netherlands justified by the idea of homegrown radicalization

2005–2015: Institutionalising counter-radicalisation

• 2005: UK expands Prevent strategy after London bombings partly based upon the Dutch counter-radicalization efforts.
• Mid-2000s: France, Belgium, and other states build security-led monitoring into integration policy.
• 2015: Paris and Brussels attacks are used as justification of mosque mapping in France and Belgium.

2016–2021: Local covert operations exposed in the Netherlands

• 2016–2018: Commissioned by the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, multiple Dutch municipalities hire NTA to investigate mosques in secret.
• 2021: NRC newspaper exposes the practice, sparking national outrage.

In the Netherlands, the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh added fuel to an already heated public discourse about Islam. Across the continent, “radicalisation prevention” became a policy mantra. But prevention was defined almost entirely through a security lens — identifying “risk environments” rather than addressing the social or economic drivers of alienation.

This approach disproportionately targeted Muslim communities. Policies like the UK’s Prevent programme, France’s anti-“separatism” measures, and Denmark’s so-called “ghetto laws” all embedded monitoring and reporting mechanisms into schools, social services, and local councils.

By the late 2010s, covert, municipality-commissioned investigations into specific mosques were being carried out. In the Netherlands, investigative journalists later revealed that at least ten municipalities had secretly hired NTA to carry out such work.Dutch lawyer Elsa van der Loo, one of the lawyers of the Taubah mosque, explains the surveillance of Dutch Muslims in this TRT Report:

The Taubah Case: Drawing a Legal Line

The Taubah Mosque investigation was typical of this new wave. Under the guise of mapping community dynamics, researchers conducted interviews and gathered data without disclosure. The methodology blurred the line between academic research and intelligence-gathering.

The court dismantled the municipality’s defence point by point:

• No statutory authority – Municipalities cannot run intelligence operations without a clear legal mandate.
• Privacy violations – The covert collection of personal data, including religious and political opinions, is a serious breach of Article 8 ECHR.
• Unlawful sharing – Distributing the report to ministries and intelligence agencies amplified the harm.

In part, the municipality’s argument essentially followed a familiar security narrative:
because groups like IS and Al Qaeda have carried out attacks internationally, local authorities are justified in gathering covert intelligence on their own Muslim communities “just in case” signs of radicalisation might emerge.

On the surface, this can sound like a safety-first precaution. But when you unpack it, the logic rests on — and reinforces — structural Islamophobia. Basically, the municipality followed a similar reasoning as a person who commits an arson attack on a mosque after an attack by IS or Al Qaeda. Allow me to unpack this a little.

1. Collective Suspicion

The reasoning treats the local Muslim community as a potential threat category simply because extremists elsewhere claim an Islamic identity. This is a form of guilt by association: the behaviour of a violent minority is projected onto millions of ordinary believers, leading to blanket suspicion.

2. Disproportionate Focus

Comparable reasoning is almost never applied to other forms of political or ideological violence. When far-right extremists carry out attacks, entire neighbourhoods of white, Christian, or secular residents are not secretly mapped, infiltrated, or investigated. The selective focus reflects a racialised and religiously specific lens that exists for a long time but has gained significance as a global security matter after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

3. Security Over Rights

The argument assumes that “security” can legitimately override basic legal protections — such as privacy, freedom of religion, and freedom of association — without specific, individualised suspicion. This echoes the post-9/11 policy climate in which Muslim communities were subjected to surveillance programs without concrete evidence of wrongdoing. In that sense the program of the municipalities was not unique: imam educations after 2005, mosques and Islamic schools in the 1990s and after, have been the object of similar investigations sometimes by private consultancy firms (NTA is not a unique case either), sometimes by municipalities, journalists, academics working to gather information of the intelligence and security agencies and/police without any regard for fundamental rights and jurisdiction.

4. Reinforcement of the “Internal Enemy” Frame

By linking the very existence of a Muslim community to the threat of terrorism, the logic frames Muslims as an internal security problem, rather than as citizens with rights equal to all others. This is a key element of structural Islamophobia: the institutional embedding of Muslim exceptionalism in security policy.

5. Normalising Preventive Overreach

The “better safe than sorry” argument plays into the pre-crime mindset — the idea that authorities should act before any offence is committed, based on vague risk indicators. When applied disproportionately to Muslims, it both entrenches discriminatory monitoring and normalises intrusive, non-evidence based policing.

In short, the municipality’s justification recycles a broader European and global pattern: real acts of terrorism by a tiny number of violent extremists are used to legitimise the disproportionate surveillance of entire Muslim communities, without equivalent treatment of other groups. Or as stated by a spokesperson of a interregional umbrella organisation:

“It is sad to see that the government does not adhere to its own rules and violates the fundamental rights of some of its citizens. There is a certain tension in the case of Muslims.”

This not only erodes trust between communities and authorities, but it also reproduces the structural conditions in which Islamophobia thrives. Moreover, during the court’s session the lawyers of the municipality actually used the Islamophobic logic again by emphasizing the need to act because of violent acts of Muslims elsewhere.

Why This Matters for Europe

While the Taubah case is a Dutch judgment, its implications could perhaps (not a legal expert here) reach well beyond national borders:

• Precedent – It is one of the first court decisions to explicitly condemn local-government-led surveillance of a Muslim community.
• Challenge to “security logic” – It rebukes the idea that anything labelled “counter-radicalisation” is automatically justified.
• Human rights reinforcement – It reaffirms that religious communities enjoy the same protections as any other group.

If taken seriously, the ruling could serve as a reference point for similar challenges in other countries, from Belgium and France to the UK and Austria. This decision is the latest chapter in a longer story — one marked by an expansion of state powers, increased targeting of Muslim communities, and occasional pushback.

The Taubah ruling is a reminder that structural Islamophobia is not just a matter of individual prejudice — it is embedded in policy choices, institutional cultures, and security frameworks. Changing that requires more than court victories; it demands a shift in how governments define safety, community, and belonging. The legal and political ramifications of the verdict are explained very well by my colleague Nawal Mustafa on the site of the public litigation lawyers PILP which was part of the legal team for the mosque.

For now, the Taubah case stands as one of the clearest legal signals yet that the unchecked surveillance of Muslim communities is incompatible with European human rights standards. This public conclusion is important. As stated by the chairman of the mosque:

“Despite repeated denial by the municipality, the judge has now finally established that there was indeed unlawful act. That is an important recognition for us.“

It is a victory that is important for all. As the court aptly considered: conducting such investigations without a legal basis is undesirable and unthinkable in a democratic society, because that would mean that the State could arbitrarily encroach on the rights of its subjects.

While this judgment benefits all Dutch citizens by reinforcing limits on state surveillance, it comes at a cost to those who had to fight it. For Dutch Muslims, it is yet another instance of being the proving ground for Europe’s commitment to civil liberties. As stated by the chairman of a national umbrella organisation:

Even if you have lived and worked in this country for forty or fifty years, people don’t trust you.

Furthermore, we could add, it is the people who are distrusted because of their religious identity who now have to go to court to prove they are worthy of the same rights as everyone else and, moreover, have to secure those rights for everyone.

The Taubah case is a win for privacy, religious freedom, and the rule of law. But it also lays bare a deeper truth: in Europe’s ongoing balancing act between security and liberty, it is often Muslim communities who must bear the weight of pushing that balance back toward justice.