The right to inspect evidence allows a party to a Dutch civil dispute to demand access to specific data held by the opposing party or by a third party. Since 1 January 2025 it is governed by articles 194 to 195a of the Code of Civil Procedure (Wetboek van Burgerlijke Rechtsvordering, Rv), which replaced the former article 843a Rv. A request can be made directly to the holder of the data or put to the court, and it covers digital material just as much as paper. What follows sets out what you can demand, from whom, on what conditions, and on what grounds a request can be turned down.
What the right to inspect evidence covers
Dutch civil procedure has never had anything resembling American-style discovery. Each party builds its own case and produces its own documents; there is no general obligation to open your files to your opponent. What the law gives instead is a targeted right of inspection, historically called the exhibitieplicht: if you can point to identifiable material that matters to a legal relationship you are involved in, you can compel the person who holds it to let you see it, to give you a copy, or to provide an extract.
That right sits alongside a broader duty that applies to everyone in a civil case. Under article 21 Rv the parties must state the facts that are relevant to the decision fully and truthfully, and a court that finds this duty breached may draw whatever conclusion it considers appropriate. The right of inspection is the enforcement mechanism behind that duty. It is what stops a case from being decided on the half of the record that one side found convenient to disclose.
Two distinctions are worth making at the outset. The right of inspection is not a data subject access request under article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation: that is a privacy right, it concerns your own personal data, and it is not designed to build a case. Nor is it a request under the Open Government Act (Wet open overheid, Woo), which is aimed at public bodies and public information. Inspection under the Rv is a procedural instrument, tied to a dispute and to the facts that decide it.
It is just as important to be clear about what the right does not do. It creates no general duty to hand over your file, no obligation to search for material that has not been asked for, and no automatic duty to preserve documents the moment a dispute becomes foreseeable. Retention obligations in the Netherlands come from elsewhere: the seven-year commercial and tax retention duty for the books and records of a business, sector-specific rules, and the storage limitation principle of the General Data Protection Regulation, which pushes in the opposite direction. Deliberately destroying material once you know it is wanted is a different matter, and courts treat it accordingly.
Nor does inspection settle who is right. It settles what the court will see. That distinction shapes strategy: material obtained through inspection has to be used, which means anticipating what the other side will do with the same material once it has been produced.
What changed on 1 January 2025
The Act on the simplification and modernisation of the law of evidence (Wet vereenvoudiging en modernisering bewijsrecht) was adopted by the House of Representatives on 30 January 2024 and by the Senate on 5 March 2024, published in the Bulletin of Acts and Decrees as Stb. 2024, 62, and brought into force on 1 January 2025 by a separate royal decree, Stb. 2024, 72. It is in force now; this is settled law, not a proposal.
The transitional rule matters as much as the substance. The new provisions apply to proceedings commenced on or after 1 January 2025. Cases that were already running on that date continue to be governed by the old rules until they end, although a fresh instance begun after that date, such as an appeal, falls under the new regime. If you are in a long-running matter, check which set of rules your case is actually under before you draft anything.
The substantive changes
Article 843a Rv has been repealed and its successor provisions have been moved into the section of the Code that deals with evidence, in paragraph 7 of the ninth section of title 2 of Book 1. The most practically important change is a change of vocabulary: the law no longer speaks of bescheiden (documents) but of gegevens (data). That closes a long-running argument about whether e-mail, chat traffic on platforms such as Teams or Slack, database records, log files and metadata could be demanded in the same way as a signed contract. They can.
The legislation also confirms that inspection can be sought from a third party who is not involved in the dispute but happens to hold the material. A bank, an accountant, a former IT supplier or a logistics provider can all be addressed directly, which removes one of the sharpest limitations of the old rule. For public bodies there is an express limit: under article 194 paragraph 3 Rv a public authority that is not a party to the proceedings has no duty to produce information that would not have to be disclosed under the Woo.
Alongside the inspection provisions, the Act consolidated the preliminary evidence measures. Where a party previously had to file separate applications for a preliminary witness examination, a preliminary expert report and a preliminary site inspection, these can now be combined in a single application under article 196 Rv and the articles that follow it. Evidentiary attachment (bewijsbeslag) and the other measures for the protection of evidence have been codified in articles 205 to 207 Rv, and a bailiff can now draw up a formal record of what he has observed, a proces-verbaal van constateringen, with a defined status as evidence.
Old and new compared
The table below sets out the practical differences for individuals and businesses.
| Aspect | Until 31 December 2024 (art. 843a Rv) | From 1 January 2025 (art. 194-195a Rv) |
|---|---|---|
| Object of the request | Bescheiden: documents, with recurring argument about digital material. | Gegevens: data in any form, including e-mail, chat, databases and log files. |
| Who can be addressed | Primarily the opposing party; claims against third parties were contested. | The opposing party and third parties who hold the data, with a Woo-based limit for public bodies. |
| Route | A claim before the court, in or alongside the main proceedings. | An out-of-court request under art. 194 Rv, or a claim or petition to the court under art. 195 Rv. |
| Preliminary measures | Separate applications for witnesses, experts and site inspection. | One application can combine them, art. 196 Rv and following. |
| Securing evidence | Evidentiary attachment developed in case law, without a clear statutory basis. | Codified as measures for the protection of evidence, art. 205-207 Rv. |
The conditions a request must satisfy
Inspection is not a right to go through someone else. Three conditions apply cumulatively, and a request that fails on one of them fails altogether:
- A sufficient interest. You must show why this material matters to your legal position, not merely that it might be interesting. Courts refuse a large share of requests on precisely this point.
- Sufficiently specified data. The material must be identifiable. A request for all correspondence over the last five years is not a request; a request for the e-mail traffic between two named people about one named contract between two dates is.
- A legal relationship. The data must concern a legal relationship to which you are a party, or which you are otherwise entitled to invoke. The legislator intended this to be read broadly, and it covers a relationship arising from tort as well as from contract.
The purpose of these conditions is to keep the door open for a party that knows what it is looking for while closing it on the fishing expedition. In practice the specification requirement is met by defining the material along three axes: who held or sent it, over what period, and about what subject. Selection by search terms, agreed in advance or set by the court, has become the normal way of doing this where the volume of data is large.
The threshold is not a formality. A request that is drafted in a hurry, without a clear explanation of why each category of data bears on a contested fact, is the most common reason for an inspection claim to fail. The effort belongs in the drafting, not in the hearing.
Asking out of court and asking the court
There are two routes, and they are alternatives rather than steps in a sequence. Article 194 Rv allows you to address the holder of the data directly, without involving a judge. Article 195 Rv allows you to put the demand to the court, either as part of the main proceedings or in a separate application. You do not have to try the first before using the second, although a documented attempt to obtain the material informally almost always strengthens the case for an order.
The out-of-court route is cheap and fast when it works. A precise written request, addressed to the right person, setting out the legal relationship, the categories of data and a reasonable deadline, often produces the material within weeks. If it does not, the correspondence itself becomes evidence: it shows the court that the request was specific, that it was reasonable, and that the other side chose not to answer it.
Where the court is asked to order inspection, it can attach a penalty payment to the order under article 611a Rv, running per day or per breach until the order is complied with. It can also shape the order rather than simply granting or refusing it: ordering production in redacted form, limiting access to named advisers, or appointing an independent expert to review the material and report only on what is relevant. In a dispute between competitors, that middle course is frequently the outcome.
What the court cannot do is rewrite a badly drafted request for you. If the categories are vague, the request is refused; it is not narrowed on your behalf.
Timing deserves thought. There is no rule that inspection must wait for proceedings to begin, and asking early has obvious advantages: you learn whether the claim is worth bringing before you have paid for a summons. A request made out of court also has no effect on a limitation period, so if the limitation period is close, interrupt it separately by written notice under article 3:317 of the Civil Code rather than assuming that an ongoing exchange about documents does the job. Where proceedings are already running, an inspection claim can be brought as an incidental claim within them, and courts have shown themselves willing to hear such claims quickly where the material is plainly central to the case.
When inspection can be refused
A wider right of inspection is not an unlimited one. The person holding the data may refuse where there are compelling reasons for doing so, and a number of grounds are firmly established.
The first is legal professional privilege. Correspondence with your advocate, and with other professionals who hold a duty of confidentiality recognised in law such as civil-law notaries and doctors, is protected. The privilege that excuses a witness from answering under article 165 Rv works in the same way here: a party cannot obtain through an inspection order what it could not obtain by calling the professional as a witness. Close relatives are protected in a comparable way.
The second is the protection of business secrets. The Trade Secrets Protection Act (Wet bescherming bedrijfsgeheimen), which implements the EU Trade Secrets Directive, protects information that is secret, has commercial value because it is secret, and is subject to reasonable steps to keep it that way. Source code, pricing models, recipes and customer intelligence usually qualify. The answer is rarely a flat refusal: the court weighs the interest in secrecy against the interest in proof and often orders disclosure under conditions. Where a dispute with a departing employee or a competitor is the background, our article on a breached non-compete clause and trade secrets sets out how those two interests interact.
The third is proportionality. A court may refuse a request where the cost, time and disruption of collecting the material are out of all proportion to what it could contribute to the case. This is the ground that bites hardest on sweeping requests for years of unstructured data.
The fourth concerns personal data. Producing data about identifiable people is itself processing under the General Data Protection Regulation and needs a lawful basis; special categories, such as health data, are subject to stricter rules again. This does not make personal data untouchable in litigation, but it does mean the scope has to be justified and the material handled properly. Our article explaining the processing of biometric data gives a sense of how demanding those rules become for sensitive categories.
Finally, a request can be refused where it is an abuse of procedure, and a public body that is not a party to the case can point to the Woo: if the information would not have to be released under that Act, it does not have to be produced under article 194 Rv either.
Securing evidence before it disappears
Inspection is worth nothing if the material has been deleted by the time the order arrives. That is why the Act also codified the measures for the protection of evidence in articles 205 to 207 Rv. With leave of the interim relief judge, a bailiff can seize documents, devices and data carriers, or make forensic copies of them, and place the result in the custody of a neutral third party.
One point about this procedure is regularly misunderstood, and it is expensive to misunderstand. An evidentiary attachment freezes the material; it does not give you sight of it. Seeing what has been secured requires a separate inspection order under article 195 Rv, and the party whose data was seized will be heard on that question. Leave for the attachment is usually granted without the other side present; access never is.
The preliminary evidence measures under article 196 Rv and the articles that follow serve a different purpose: establishing facts before, or without, a full trial. A preliminary witness examination secures a recollection before it fades or a witness moves abroad. A preliminary expert report puts a technical question to a neutral expert. Since 1 January 2025 these can be requested together, and combined with an inspection request, in one application. That is a genuine saving, and it is the change most likely to affect how disputes are prepared.
Evidence held abroad
If the data sits with a party or a witness in another EU member state, a Dutch court order is not the instrument to use. Regulation (EU) 2020/1783 on the taking of evidence in civil and commercial matters, which has applied since 1 July 2022, allows a Dutch court to ask a court in the other member state to take the evidence, or in some cases to take it directly, using standard forms and electronic transmission. Outside the EU the Hague Evidence Convention of 1970 performs a similar function for the states that are party to it. Both routes take longer than a domestic order, which is a further argument for identifying early where the material actually is.
Regulatory inspections follow a separate regime
When an inspector from a supervisory authority arrives at your premises, the Rv does not apply. Supervision is governed by chapter 5 of the General Administrative Law Act (Algemene wet bestuursrecht, Awb), and the powers there are considerably broader than anything a litigant has.
A supervisor designated under the Awb may enter every place except a dwelling without the occupant's consent (article 5:15 Awb), demand information (article 5:16 Awb), demand inspection of business data and documents and take copies (article 5:17 Awb), examine goods and take samples (article 5:18 Awb) and stop and examine means of transport (article 5:19 Awb). Article 5:20 Awb obliges everyone to cooperate within a reasonable time; failing to do so is itself an offence. The counterweights are real but limited: under article 5:13 Awb a supervisor may use a power only so far as is reasonably necessary for the task, those bound by a professional duty of confidentiality may refuse cooperation under article 5:20 paragraph 2 Awb, and once questioning turns towards imposing an administrative fine the person questioned must be cautioned under article 5:10a Awb and is not obliged to answer.
In practice, three things decide how a regulatory visit goes. Ask for identification and for the legal basis of the visit, and note both. Keep a record of everything that is handed over or copied, because you will want to know later what the authority actually has. And separate legally privileged material from the rest before it is copied rather than after, since a claim of privilege made a week later is far weaker than one made at the desk.
Inspection findings are also increasingly public. Several authorities publish inspection results and enforcement decisions online, which turns a compliance issue into a reputational one; you can read more about how government inspections work on the government's own business portal. If the matter moves from supervision into a criminal investigation, a different set of rules applies again, and our guide to the criminal procedure in the Netherlands from investigation to verdict explains that route.
Making and answering a request in practice
Knowing the rules is one thing; using them is another. The quality of an inspection request is decided before it is filed, and the quality of a response is decided by how methodically the request is taken apart.
If you are asking for inspection
- Define the material. Name the custodians, the date range and the subject. Ask for the e-mail correspondence between two named individuals about one named project over one named quarter, not for correspondence in general.
- Tie each category to a contested fact. For every category you ask for, write one sentence explaining which disputed point it proves or disproves. If you cannot write that sentence, remove the category.
- Ask out of court first, in writing. Set a reasonable deadline and say what you will do if it passes. This costs a fortnight and often saves a hearing.
- Anticipate the defences. Privilege, business secrets and proportionality will be raised. Offer the answer in advance: a narrower period, a redaction protocol, an independent expert, a confidentiality undertaking.
If you have received a request
Silence is the one response that never works. An unanswered request invites an order with a penalty payment attached, and it hands the other side an argument about your good faith that will follow you through the case. Start instead by testing the request against the statutory conditions: is the material identified precisely enough, is a legal relationship shown, and is there a real interest, or is this an attempt to see what turns up.
Then map what you actually hold, including material on systems you may have forgotten: former employees' mailboxes, backups, chat platforms, the phone of a director. You cannot decide what to refuse until you know what exists, and an inaccurate statement about what you hold is far more damaging than an uncomfortable document.
Where you do object, object on stated legal grounds and in writing. Where part of the request is reasonable, say so and produce that part; a partial, well-explained production is treated very differently from a blanket refusal. And where the objection is really about confidentiality rather than relevance, propose the mechanism yourself. Courts accept redaction, staged production and expert review, but they accept them far more readily from the party that offered them.
Inspection in shareholder disputes
Corporate conflicts show the limits of inspection clearly. A minority shareholder who suspects mismanagement can ask for identified board minutes or a specific financial model under article 195 Rv, but cannot demand the board's correspondence at large. Where the real complaint is about how the company is run, the right of inquiry (enquêterecht) under articles 2:344 and following of the Civil Code is usually the stronger instrument, because an investigator appointed by the Enterprise Chamber (Ondernemingskamer) obtains access to the company's records as a matter of course. Since the WAGEVOE entered into force on 1 January 2025, the rules on inquiry proceedings and the statutory buy-out and exit procedures have themselves been amended. Choosing the right procedure is often worth more than choosing the right documents.
What this means for record keeping
The practical consequence of a broader definition of evidence is that almost everything your organisation produces is potentially disclosable. That argues for three things: a retention policy that says what is kept, where and for how long, and that is actually followed; awareness among staff that messages on internal chat platforms are documents like any other; and a periodic check that the policy still matches the systems in use. None of this is exotic, and all of it is cheaper than reconstructing five years of data under a court deadline.
Frequently asked questions
The questions below come up in almost every matter where inspection is on the table.
How does this affect digital evidence?
These reforms pull the law squarely into the 21st century. Evidence like emails, messages on internal chats such as Teams or Slack, and database records are now treated just the same as old-school paper documents.
The law now speaks of gegevens (data) rather than bescheiden (documents), so the format of the material is no longer a hurdle where it is relevant to the case. This much-needed update ensures the principle of lower barriers, greater access applies to the kinds of evidence that are central to modern business.
What costs are involved in a request?
While the process is designed to be more accessible, it isn't completely free of cost. The party asking for the inspection is usually on the hook for their own legal fees for putting together and filing the application, and for the court fee (griffierecht), the level of which is fixed by law and adjusted each year.
The court decides how the cost of collecting and producing the data is shared, and it can place that cost on the party that asked for it. Where the effort involved is out of all proportion to the value of the material, the request can be refused on that ground alone. At the end of the case the losing party is ordered to pay a fixed contribution to the other side, calculated on the standard scale applied by the courts.
What happens if a party refuses to comply?
Ignoring a court order for inspection is a serious mistake, and one that comes with heavy consequences. A court has several tools at its disposal to penalise a party that won't cooperate and to enforce its decision.
These sanctions can include:
- Financial Penalties: The court can attach a penalty payment (dwangsom) to its order under article 611a Rv, running until the party complies.
- Adverse Inferences: Under article 21 Rv the court may draw whatever conclusion it considers appropriate, which in practice means assuming that the withheld material would have damaged the non-compliant party's case.
- Procedural Disadvantages: In the most serious instances of non-compliance, the court could go as far as striking out parts of their legal claim or defence entirely.
In short, refusing to comply can do irreparable damage to a party's legal standing and credibility in court.
Law and More advises businesses and individuals on evidence and disclosure in Dutch civil proceedings: drafting and defending inspection requests, applications for preliminary witness examinations and expert reports, evidentiary attachment, and the handling of regulatory inspections. If you need material that another party holds, or you have been asked to produce material you would rather not disclose, our civil law team will tell you where you stand and what the realistic options are. Contact us to discuss your case.
