In a ruling last week, the European Court of Justice ruled the income requirement for Dutch residents to bring their partners from abroad was a clear violation of European laws for family reunification.

Since 2004, anybody who wants to bring his or her partner to live in the Netherlands needs to earn at least 120 percent of the minimum wage.  This condition effectively makes it impossible for people on welfare to marry a foreigner and live together in the Netherlands, but also excludes students and those working part-time.

The income requirement is but one of many introduced in recent years by the Dutch government that has been looking to limit immigration in general. Foreigners looking to marry a Dutch resident are now required to complete a language and citizenship test in their country of origin for instance. In addition, both partners now need to be at least 21 years of age.

What do you think? Is it reasonable to place demands on people looking to bring their spouses to other countries? Or is the right to marry whoever one pleases an inalienable one? If you have personal experience with this, please share it.

Wednesday’s local election results show the Netherlands’ electorate has grown ever more fractured. Traditional parties are losing ground and Geert Wilders’ populist Party for Freedom (PVV) garnered a spectacular amount of votes in the two cities where it participated.

Although local results cannot be translated to the national level for a number of reasons a few predictions can be made based on them. The upcoming election campaign is likely to focus on the battle between CDA prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Labour leader Wouter Bos, with anti-Islamic Wilders as the strong third competitor.

Whoever wins the popular vote, the big challenge after the June 9 election will be the formation of a coalition government. The Christian Democratic/Labour government that fell last month won’t return. Bos has ruled out a coalition with Wilders. Balkenende is keeping his options open, but doesn’t look to keen to partner with the populist leader either.

Three scenarios were mentioned in an NRC Handelsblad analysis: a three party coalition composed of CDA, PVV and right-wing liberals VVD, a revival of the ‘Purple’ (Labour, VVD and left-wing liberal D66) coalition that was in power from 1994 to 2002 augmented by GroenLinks, or a minority coalition, as is common in Denmark.

What do you think? Are any of these scenarios likely? What could be an alternative?

A Dutch Prince of the Carnival was snubbed by the Catholic Church recently when a priest refused to grant him holy communion because he lives together with his boyfriend. The incident resulted has gotten much attention in the Netherlands and now multitudes of gay men and women look set to descend on one of the Netherlands’ largest Catholic churches next Sunday in protest. The big question is whether the church will then refuse offer the wafer and a sip of wine to any, or all, of its new visitors.

Gijs Vermeulen, the carnival prince who set off the current quarrel, said he felt “treated differently” when his priest refused to share Christ’s body with him. Vermeulen added that if the Catholic Church was true to its own standards, very few people would be able to take communion. The diocese of Den Bosch, the backdrop for the recent upheaval, has announced it will also be asking remarried divorcees and other people “living in sin” not to take communion from now on.

What do you think? Is the Catholic Church only being consistent in refusing Vermeulen his communion? Or is it just a case of thinly veiled discrimination?

This week’s news of the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Mambouh in Dubai on January 20 most likely being the work of Israel’s secret service Mossad, has put the issue of murders by government agencies back in the limelight.
The practice of targeted killing has a long history in Israel. Most famously, the Mossad hunted down and killed many of those it held responsible for the murder of several Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics.

Israel is probably not the only nation that doles out death on a personal level. Last year, the New Yorker magazine reported the United States uses surgical drone missile strikes to take out key Taliban leaders. In one such strike, 11 people died who happened to be unlucky enough to be close to a target.

Collateral damage is one of the main moral objections raised against state-sponsored assassinations. An oft cited argument in favour of the liquidations is that they are in the interest of justice.

Probably the most important question is whether the strikes are effective. If the killing of an alleged terrorist leader can prevent future attacks, hundreds of lives might be saved in the process. Of course, the opposite may also hold true: perhaps the killing of its leadership motivates a terrorist organisation to carry out more attacks in retribution.

What do you think? Are targeted killings by government agencies justified? Why? Are they effective?

Since 2007, all pregnant women in the Netherlands are offered an ultrasound in the 20th week of their pregnancy. This specific moment was chosen because the sonogram will then show the sex of the baby, but also because birth defects can be detected at a stage where abortion is still legal. If the foetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome, hydrocephalus, split spine of cleft lip, parents have until week 24 to determine whether they would rather not let their baby be born.

Data released this week, show the number of abortions between week 20 and 24 have doubled from 140 in 2006 to 276 in 2008. The new statistics triggered the orthodox Christian party ChristenUnie to call for postponing the ultrasound until after the point in the pregnancy where abortions are no longer legal. If that won’t get support in parliament, the party wants to ban abortions after 18 weeks.

This issue is just one of many currently debated by politicians, medical professionals, ethicists and patient advocacy organisations in the Netherlands and elsewhere regarding abortion. Where do we draw the line when it comes to birth defects? Should parents be allowed to decide against having a baby if doctors can see early on that is will be autistic? And if they should, why not abort a girl when they would rather have a boy?

What do you think? Is it up to the government to decide when and why people can have an abortion? Or should it always be the choice of the mother to decide whether or not she wants to continue a pregnancy and should she have all knowledge available to make that decision?

European nightlife is dead – at least so a lot of people think. NRC International will be examining the true state of affairs in a number of European cities, including Rotterdam, Paris and Belgrade, over the coming days in a series written by our correspondents.

The first instalment, published on Wednesday, deals with parallel grassroots movements in both Amsterdam and Paris. In these cities, revellers have cited the strict enforcement of sometimes petty rules as major buzzkill.

In Amsterdam, the ban on drinking alcoholic beverages standing up drew scorn and ridicule from many. (No, you are not supposed to drink it lying down, sitting in a chair puts you well within the limits of the law.) But the rules, of course, are intended to protect residents from revellers that may get a little bit too boisterous after one too many.

How do you feel about the measures taken in several European cities to make the nightlife safer, but at the same time more boring? Are laws a necessary evil, or do you support the grassroots movements fight the party-averse measures? Do you feel you can still paint the town red or have the restrictions affected you?

A report published by a Dutch government think tank last week levelled some heavy charges at foreign aid policy. The 352-page report labelled Dutch development aid policy “pretentious” and argued its contribution to the development of poor countries was modest at best. The report also made the case for limiting foreign aid spending to ten countries. Currently, the Dutch give out aid to four times as many developing nations.

Politicians were quick to find support for their own positions in the pages of the report. Foreign aid minister Bert Koenders for instance, said the report would help him in “modernising foreign aid”. Arend Jan Boekestijn, a long time critic of development aid and a former member of parliament for the VVD, painted the report as an argument for cutting back on government spending on foreign aid, which has long stood at 0.7 percent of GDP.

What do you think? What makes sustainable development aid policy and how much should rich nations like the Netherlands spend on it?

The Balkenende government seems to have narrowly averted a full-blown crisis by admitting that “in hindsight” it could have done better in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The admission did not come easily, following a day of tense deliberations between government parties.

The special committee of inquiry, chaired by retired supreme court judge, Willibrord Davids, did not mince words in its description of the political failures that paved the way to the invasion of Iraq.  Its conclusions resonate with critical appraisals of the decision-making process leading up to the war in the UK and the US: politicians based their views on poor intelligence data and they deliberately misconstrued the little information they did get.

The legal case for an invasion was exaggerated, with precedents from international law misinterpreted through wishful thinking. After a limited number of executives decided to go through with the war, little room was left for debate. These failures had varying political consequences in different countries.

Not all Western countries fell victim to what might be labeled groupthink. France and Germany, notably, refused to support the American invasion of Iraq, which makes the question why the decision making process in other countries had such a different outcome all the more relevant.

What do you think? What could the Netherlands have done better in the run-up to the invasion? Has Balkenende done plenty by admitting some fault, or has his position been so badly damaged that he should step down?

Last Tuesday, Iceland’s Olafur Ragnar Grimsson vetoed a bill that would have required his nation to repay the Netherlands the 1.8 billion euros in  damages it incurred after IceSave went bankrupt.

The initial reaction in the Netherlands was harsh. The Dutch minister of finance, Wouter Bos, said he was “very disappointed.” Dutch European parliamentarian Hans van Baalen even threatened to block the nation’s entry into the European Union.

Since then, voices have risen urging we should not be too hard on the smallest Nordic country. Eva Joly, a Dutch colleague of Van Baalen, has said that Iceland risks becoming severely impoverished if the Dutch stick with their demands of full repayment of damages at 5.5 percent interest. She also called it unfair that the Icelandic population at large had to pay for the mistakes of a handful of banks.

What do you think? Is it unfair to expect the Icelandic population to repay a debt incurred by others? Or would a waiver of the debt provide an unwelcome precedent?

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Friday failed, but he did succeed in taking 80 grammes of explosive PETN powder on board. The question being raised in the Netherlands is whether he should have been subjected to a so-called millimetre wave scan before boarding at Schiphol airport. The Amsterdam airport bought equipment that uses waves to scan the outlines of passengers’ bodies in 2007.

A millimetre wave scan creates an image that resembles a photo negative of a person’s body. The package of pentaerythritol tetranitrate under the Nigerian’s clothes would have been detected if this had been used.

But the equipment has been standing idle for over two years now. Schiphol is only allowed to test it with passenger’s express consent and the European Commission has suspended the implementation of the technology, which was originally scheduled for next year, saying it needed more time to review its pros and cons.

The technology is controversial because the scan is so detailed it makes a person look naked on the security staff’s screen. Politicians in the Netherlands have been debating the issue of privacy since Schiphol purchased the equipment. Last year Naïma Azough, a member of parliament for the Dutch Green party, challenged justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin to take the scan himself and prove it would not show his genitals. She also raised questions about who had access to the scans and if those of men and women would be reviewed by people of their own sex, as is the case with body searches.

On the opposite side of the political spectrum, right-wing liberals and Christian democrats on Monday demanded the technology be implemented immediately. Christian democrat Sybrand van Haersma Buma dismissed the privacy claims as “tall stories”.

What do you think? Has the attempted attack aboard NW 253 made it clear airport security can’t be too tight? Or should scans remain voluntary to protect passengers’ privacy? And would you personally prefer a body scan or a body search before boarding a plane?