Dutch court convicts man of child abuse after years-long dispute over Jehovah's Witness elders' confidentiality

A Dutch court has sentenced a 51-year-old man to 18 months in prison for sexually abusing two boys, in a case that was held up for years by a dispute over documents police seized from the Dutch headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in November 2018.^[1] The man denies the charges.

The Overijssel District Court gave its judgment on 5 November 2026. It is the first trial-court verdict on the charges themselves. Much of the time since 2018 went on a single question: whether congregation elders, the men appointed to lead a local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, can keep what they are told confidential from the police, as members of the clergy can. Dutch law calls that protection verschoningsrecht, a right to refuse to give evidence, and this article calls it privilege.

The judgment rules on what was left of that dispute in this case. The court held that almost all of the material the defence still objected to was not privileged. Tapped telephone calls between one witness and two other people were, and the court refused to use them as evidence. It rejected the defence's request to stop the prosecution altogether.^[1]

The trial was of one man. The Jehovah's Witnesses organisation was not a defendant, and the court said in 2020 that the elders who objected to the seizure were not suspects.^[2] The court published its judgment with the names of the defendant, the two victims and the elders removed, as Dutch courts do.

What the court found proven

The court found that the man, born in 1975, abused the first boy over several years in the 1990s, in Assen and the municipality of Weststellingwerf. The charges covered May 1993 to December 1997, starting on the day the defendant turned 18, when the boy was nine. That abuse was charged as two offences, one for the period before the boy turned 12 and one for the period after. The court accepted the victim's account that the abuse began when he was six and went on until he was 13. The two families were close: the judgment says the victim's mother and the defendant's mother were good friends and that the victim and his mother lived for a time in the defendant's parental home.^[1]

The second boy was the defendant's eight-year-old nephew. The court found that the defendant committed indecent acts with him during a stay in Assen in August 2016.^[1]

The man denied everything and his lawyer asked for an acquittal on all three charges. The defence argued that the first victim had been questioned suggestively and that the nephew's account reached police only through his parents; the court rejected both objections and found the accounts reliable. The victim of the 1990s abuse went to the police on 30 April 2018. Dutch law does not allow a conviction on one witness's word alone, and the court listed what it treated as support: statements by the first victim's mother and brother, and four letters of apology the defendant wrote to the victim and his mother. The defendant said the letters apologised only for sharing a bed and a goodnight kiss; the court said their tone and content did not fit that explanation.^[1]

NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, reported in May 2023 that the man was a member of Jehovah's Witnesses at the time of the 1990s abuse and was no longer a member by 2018.^[3] The judgment itself records that documents on his computer dealt with his requests to elders "to be able to return to Jehovah's Witnesses".^[1]

The 2018 searches

The investigation did not start with the searches. The judgment records the Court of Appeal's finding that it started from the first victim's report to the police, witness interviews, the defendant's own statements, letters he wrote to the victim and the victim's mother, and data-protection documents his wife handed to police at his request.^[1]

On 19 November 2018, the judgment says, investigators searched the headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Netherlands, a Kingdom Hall (the Witnesses' name for a place of worship) and the homes of elders, and seized documents with a judge's authorisation.^[1] NOS reported that seven properties were searched and that the headquarters is in Emmen.^[3][4]

Prosecutors were looking for the records of judicial committees. The court said in 2020 that these are committees the Witnesses form when a member is accused of child sexual abuse.^[2]

The organisation and five elders objected to the seizure, arguing that elders are covered by religious privilege, and asked for the documents back.^[2][3]

The rulings on elders' confidentiality, 2020 to 2026

The judgment sets out what happened next.^[1] Two of the decisions were made by an investigating judge, a judge who supervises a criminal investigation before trial.

• 8 May 2020. A panel of the Overijssel court rejected the complaint. It held that elders sitting on a judicial committee were not entitled to privilege, and that the organisation could not claim it through them.^[1][2]
• 19 January 2021. The Supreme Court of the Netherlands set that decision aside and sent the matter back for a fresh decision.
• 15 July 2021. An investigating judge rejected the complaint again. The elders challenged that too.
• 10 December 2021. The court said it was possible that the elders did have privilege and told the investigating judge to examine the claim in full.
• 13 July 2022. The investigating judge decided that privilege covered every seized document about information shared with elders in confidence as pastoral care, including information about judicial committees and including the documents seized about this defendant.
• 30 September 2022. The court ordered the privileged part of the seized material destroyed. Prosecutors, who had appealed and then withdrawn the appeal, removed that material from the file and summoned the defendant in June 2023.
• 15 August 2023. The Overijssel court ruled that the prosecution could not go ahead at all (in Dutch law, the prosecutor was declared "inadmissible"). Prosecutors appealed.
• 31 March 2025. The Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal overturned that ruling. As the judgment describes it, the appeal court found that the breaches of privilege had not been so serious, large-scale and persistent that the case had to be stopped, and sent it back to Overijssel for trial.
• 15 May 2026. A file that had been cleaned a second time was handed over for the trial.

According to the judgment, the Court of Appeal read the Supreme Court's 2021 decision as meaning that an elder is covered by privilege only in exceptional cases: where he is so closely involved in giving spiritual help and care to members that he counts as a member of the clergy to whom a member must be able to turn freely, without fear of disclosure. On that reading, privilege for an elder is "not the main rule, but an exception".^[1]

What the court decided about the remaining material

At trial the defence argued that privileged material was still in the file, and that this was a reason to stop the prosecution or, failing that, to leave the material out of the evidence.^[1]

The court went through the items one by one.

• Letters between the defendant and elders, which the defendant's wife gave to police. Not privileged: the court noted they were put into the case on the defendant's own initiative.
• Other documents from the defendant's computer. Not privileged. They concerned his requests for his personal data under the EU's data-protection law (the GDPR) and his requests to return to the Witnesses, with the elders' replies, and the court said they were not about giving spiritual help.
• The record of an interview with an elder. Not privileged, because the elder said nothing of substance about spiritual help or care he had been closely involved in.
• Tapped telephone calls. For "the vast majority" of calls the court found no privileged material, noting that the background of the elder on the line and his relationship to the other speaker were not always clear.^[1]

Some calls were treated differently. A witness in the case who belonged to the community rang two people for advice about whether to give a statement to the police. In one of the calls, the court said, she said she was praying and reading the Bible without finding an answer, and needed to know what Jehovah thought. The court found that the two people were giving her spiritual help or pastoral care, that the calls were therefore privileged, and that the recordings should have been destroyed.^[1]

That was a procedural breach that could no longer be repaired, the court said. But it found that investigators had not acted deliberately, that prosecutors could be blamed only to a limited extent given how unclear the law had been, and that the calls had not steered the investigation. It let the prosecution stand and excluded the calls from the evidence.^[1]

The judicial committee letter

One document from within the Witnesses' own structure was used as evidence on the charge involving the nephew.

The court relied on a letter dated 21 August 2018 that the judgment attributes to an "independent unit" of the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. The judgment's list of evidence describes it as a summary of a judicial committee session of 9 December 2016, addressed to the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Netherlands. According to the judgment, it says the defendant told the committee that he had briefly manipulated a minor's genitals. A witness questioned by the investigating judge in September 2026 said the letter's content was based on what elders had reported.^[1]

The court treated the letter and that witness's statement, together with part of the defendant's own account of bathing the boy, as support for what the boy had told his parents.^[1]

The judgment's discussion of privilege does not mention this letter, and the judgment does not say how the letter came to be in the file.^[1]

The sentence

Prosecutors asked for 30 months in prison. The court said 24 months would have been appropriate and took off six because the case had run far beyond the two years in which a criminal trial should normally end. The clock, it said, started when the man was taken into custody on 17 September 2018. His criminal record, dated 21 September 2026, showed no other convictions, the court said.^[1]

The reduction was larger than the usual 10 per cent, the court wrote, because of "the enormous overrun". It added that the legal uncertainty over whether elders had privilege, and the time it took to resolve, were not circumstances that could be held against the defendant.^[1]

The judgment was given by three judges, B.T.C. Jordaans presiding, with S.H. Peper and V. Wolting. The defendant was represented by M.J. Jansma, a lawyer in Kampen.^[1]