Dutch Government (SyRI)

The Hague judgment says SyRI produced a risk report. That score was not itself the enforcement decision. Q3 on this card means the scoring system. The Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment built SyRI as a Q3 Automator: a cross-agency data-linking engine that pseudonymised up to seventeen categories of personal data, ran it against an undisclosed risk model, and generated "risk reports" and flagged addresses for intervention teams across five low-income, migrant-heavy neighbourhoods. The system worked technically — the linking ran, the reports were produced, the teams deployed — but the activity it replaced was legally a Q2 Tactician function under Article 8 ECHR, requiring case-level, transparent, contestable human judgement rather than population-wide algorithmic suspicion. Across every deployment SyRI detected zero prosecuted fraud cases, while producing high false-positive rates and profiling entire neighbourhoods without ever notifying the individuals inside them that they had been scored. The District Court of The Hague ruled in February 2020 that the opacity of the risk model, the absence of a notification duty, and the exclusive targeting of poor and migrant-heavy areas made the scheme impossible to justify under Article 8's proportionality test, and the state chose not to appeal. The case stands as the European counterpart to Robodebt: a technically functional system institutionally illegitimate because it moved a rights-bearing decision into an industrial-execution cell, stopped only by a court applying transnational human-rights law rather than by the agency's own governance.

Trajectory: The state did not appeal and shut SyRI down in April 2020, but a contested successor framework (the WGS, nicknamed "Super-SyRI") entered into force in March 2025 alongside an EU AI Act prohibition on social scoring that explicitly cites the SyRI judgment.