Riding in the Golden Carriage took on a whole new meaning this week as the media reports that young Royal Military Police (Marechaussee) regularly use it as a location to engage in intercourse. The Golden Carriage is to be used by the Dutch royal family once a year to bring the monarch from a palace to a ceremonial hall in order to deliver a throne speech.
The source of the story is the mother of one of the military police who claims photos and videos have been made as proof. The military police’s lawyer says the youth have extremely static and boring work, and so they get extremely bored. He’s not surprised that they act lewdly, as their moral consciousness is not fully developed.
In July 2014 some members of the military police were fired for stealing from a sweets vending machine. Older members of the corps have demonstrated bad behaviour as well when the man who stole a piece of royal carriage admitted to it 50 years later.
(Link: nieuws.nl, Photo by Zoetnet, some rights reserved)
Tags: Golden Coach, marechaussee, military
Patent lawyer Arnout Engelfriet says (Dutch) that searches of mobile phones and laptops at the airports by the marechaussee, a form of military police, may be illegal. He refers to the fact that the powers of the marechaussee are the same as those of the regular police, and regular police may only perform searches when they have good reason to suspect a specific wrongdoing. The marechaussee’s actions are part of a test started last year in the hope to lessen the smuggling of child pornography.
According to tech news site Tweakers.net (Dutch), the justice department wanted to keep the test a secret because of expected “legal complications.” Journalist Brenno de Winter discovered that although 900 mobile phones, 62 hard disks and sundry other digital devices were searched, none of the victims were prosecuted on the basis of these searches.
The marechaussee was installed in 1814 by later king Willem I as a successor to Napoleon’s reviled gendarmerie. Its tasks have included policing of citizens from the word go. When the civil police reorganized in 1988, guard and police duties at national airport Schiphol got assigned to the marechaussee. The organization took over guard duties for the royal familie in 1908, a job hitherto performed by the palace’s gardening staff.
(Photo: colargol87, some rights reserved.)
Tags: armed robbery, border patrol, child pornography, customs, democracy, due process, GSM, illegal searches, laptops, marechaussee, military police, mobile phones, police, politics, Schiphol, transparent government
