Education Organisation ‘The new Code of Criminal Procedure brings huge gains’ Written on Thursday, September 11, 2025 We stand on the eve of the greatest educational challenge the Netherlands Police have ever faced. The new Code of Criminal Procedure comes into force on 1 April 2029. A refresher training programme will have to be developed for about 60,000 police employees. At the same time, modifications will also be necessary in police education, affecting about four hundred programmes, and the content of all the relevant knowledge systems and police systems. Applying the new Code is a huge task, explains Martine Vis, programme director for the New Code of Criminal Procedure. ‘It will have an impact on all of us. But the gains will also be huge. At that point we will have a new and modern procedural code that furnishes various possibilities for better and more effective investigative practice. And for catching criminals in today’s world.’ ‘The Code of Criminal Procedure really does need updating’, says Leonard Kok, Director of the Police Academy. ‘Proper and up-to-date knowledge of investigative practice is very important to do a good job. Teaching people practice-oriented knowledge is fundamentally the reason the Police Academy was set up in the first place.’ State of affairs ‘This April, the new Code was ratified by the House of Representatives’, Martine continues. ‘Now we’re in the process of handling the final questions the Senate has. The expectation is that the Senate will ratify the new Code by the end of this year.’ ‘At the same time, we’ve also made good progress with the change analysis’, Martine explains. ‘This involves us looking at the article in the old Code and the one in the new Code and considering the implications for work processes, additional training, and IT-systems, for instance. We’ve already put together a 1.0 version of the change analysis. ❛❛ If you hurry when you’re in time, you’ll have time when you’re in a hurry. Leonard Kok Partners There are two main sorts of organisations the Netherlands Police collaborates with: the special investigative services, and other partners such as the Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, OM). ‘The special investigative services, such as the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service, the Labour Inspectorate, or the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, do similar work to the police. We collaborate extremely closely with them’, Martine says. ‘The changes that apply to us also apply to them. So they’re making good use of our analyses too.’ ‘And we also work very closely with our other partners, such as the OM. Every day the police pass dozens of cases to the OM. For the new Code of Criminal Procedure we will continue to make use of these existing structures for all the necessary adaptations the new Code entails.’ Never lose time you can’t make up ‘If you hurry when you’re in time, you’ll have time when you’re in a hurry’, Leonard comments. ‘When you work back from the date that the new Code comes into force, time is of the essence. The focus of the additional training in the various police units will be in 2028.’ ‘That gives us only 2.5 years to prepare and organise this programme. That’s not a lot of time for a project of this size – especially when you consider that it will apply to about 60,000 people. We are in good time, but we need to stay focused. And we have to be careful not to think “it all seems quite far off”. We don’t want to lose time we can’t make up.’