Despite a complaint filed by the Dutch police unions, Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, stands by his criticism last week of police brutality during several coronavirus demonstrations in the Netherlands. ”I was genuinely afraid that the violence in the Netherlands would escalate, so I reacted quickly and firmly,” he said to NOS.
Last week, Melzer drew the ire of the Dutch police with a series of tweets. In one, he compared the arrest of a man during a coronavirus protest in The Hague in March last year with the death of George Floyd, who was killed by police brutality and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020.