Historical Organization
Dutch Parliament
Dutch Parliament
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Organization Timeline
The Netherlands enacts an abolition law for the colony
📅 8 August 1862The abolition law was enacted for Curaçao and Dependencies, with effect from 1 July 1863. It also provided compensation to enslavers, treating human beings as property for state payment purposes....
Women’s active suffrage enters into force
📅 28 September 1919The Marchant amendment to the Electoral Act gave women the right to vote. Women’s organizations had campaigned for decades; the first election in which women could actually cast ballots followed in...
Article 248bis repealed
📅 8 April 1971Parliament repealed a discriminatory criminal-law provision that had set a higher age of consent for same-sex relations between men than for heterosexual relations. COC and other advocates had...
Constitutional equality and non-discrimination clause takes effect
📅 17 February 1983The revised Constitution placed an explicit prohibition on discrimination in Article 1. The clause created a major public standard, while later movements continued to press for enforcement and...
General Equal Treatment Act takes effect
📅 1 September 1994The law prohibited discrimination on grounds including religion, belief, political opinion, race, sex, nationality, sexual orientation and marital status. It established legal routes for claims and...
Civil marriage opens to same-sex couples
📅 1 April 2001The Netherlands became the first country to open civil marriage to same-sex couples. This legal change followed LGBTQ organizing and years of public and parliamentary debate; legal equality in...
Disability and chronic-illness equal-treatment law takes effect
📅 1 December 2003The law prohibited specified forms of discrimination against people with disabilities or chronic illness, initially in work and vocational education. Disabled people and organizations continued to...
Parliamentary inquiry publishes Ongekend Onrecht
📅 17 December 2020A parliamentary inquiry found that the childcare-benefits enforcement scandal violated rule-of-law principles and that parents were wrongly branded as fraudsters. The report exposed institutional...
Article 1 explicitly adds disability and sexual orientation
📅 22 February 2023A constitutional amendment entered into force, naming disability and sexual orientation among prohibited grounds of discrimination. The change followed a long parliamentary process and advocacy by...
House of Representatives approves larger island councils for Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
📅 9 June 2026The House approved legislation to increase the number of elected council members and executive officials on the three Caribbean Netherlands islands. The change addressed representation in small island...