In response to a request from the City of Antwerp, EURIEC organised an expert platform in the municipality of Tilburg. The City of Antwerp asked EURIEC (via ARIEC Antwerp) about the possibilities of requesting information from a Dutch municipality in the context of permit granting procedures with Dutch residents.
The following partners were present at this meeting: ARIEC Antwerpen, Taskforce-RIEC Brabant-Zeeland, officials of the municipality of Tilburg and EURIEC. The theme of the expert platform was to get acquainted with and further explore the question of the City of Antwerp.
Subsequently, various ways of exchanging information were discussed. However, it turned out that a solution to the question was not easy. A major stumbling block turns out to be the fact that it would involve the submission of a list of permit applicants. After all, this is an invasion of privacy and this invasion should be as minimal as possible. The stronger the invasion of privacy, the more urgent is the need to base the exchange on an explicit legal basis. That is why the parties will examine the possibilities that a more step-by-step approach could offer at the next meeting. In doing so, they could first opt for the possibilities offered by smaller breaches of the provision of personal data, such as the sharing of passport numbers. In addition, the legal standards why you would want such information about permits should be more or less the same. By the next meeting, a comparison will therefore be made between the legal frameworks in Belgium and the Netherlands.