Cees van de Sanden

Cees A.H. van de Sanden (born 11 December 1962) is a Dutch attorney and politician for the conservative-liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

Raised in Tilburg, North Brabant, Van de Sanden studied Dutch law at the city's university at age 39 after a non-legal corporate career.

He specialized in administrative law and worked for several large law firms before setting up a solo practice.

He later established partnerships with other attorneys.

Van de Sanden is best known for his representation of the municipality of Bodegraven-Reeuwijk starting in 2021 after a conspiracy theory alleging Satanic ritual abuse caused disturbances.

Its promotors were ordered to remove social media posts in an injunction suit and to pay damages, but another case to compel social media platform Twitter to remove more posts was lost by the municipality.

One conspiracy theorist was prosecuted for death threats against Van de Sanden.

He ran for the Senate in May 2023 as the VVD's twelfth candidate but was not elected.

He was appointed to the body in June 2023 to replace Paulien Geerdink for sixteen weeks during her sick leave.

Van de Sanden was born on 11 December 1962 and grew up in Tilburg, North Brabant in the district north of its center.

In his maiden speech as senator, he told that his father worked in a textile factory, and he described him as socialist and pro-union.

Van de Sanden said he had attended the Cobbenhagen College at VWO level.

Following his education, he started a corporate career, and he later had a job as an administrative law advisor for the provincial government of South Holland.

Allegations of Satanic ritual abuse of children in Bodegraven in the 1980s were spread by three individuals – one claiming to be a survivor – through an online broadcast.

As a result, inhabitants received threats and believers flocked to the graves of supposed victims in early 2021 to lay flowers.

Mayor Christiaan van der Kamp sought legal advice after relatives had been angered, and Van de Sanden advised to prohibit non-relatives from visiting the affected cemetery through an emergency order.

After continued unrest, the municipality started an injunction suit against the three men to stop them from promoting the conspiracy theory, separate from criminal proceedings by the Public Prosecution Service.

The District Court of The Hague agreed with the municipality and ordered the defendants in July to take down their posts from social media.

Van de Sanden called it a groundbreaking judgement that would allow municipalities to tackle online disturbances through civil action.

However, he also called on the Dutch Data Protection Authority to take more action in future.

Wouter Raatgever – one of the conspiracy theorists – was sentenced to six months in prison for threats against Van de Sanden and incitement against a prominent physician-scientist.

Raatgever had accused Van de Sanden of protecting a Satanist pedophile network and said that he should receive the death penalty from a military tribunal.

Through a civil case, Bodegraven-Reeuwijk tried to recover security, clean-up, and legal costs incurred as a result of the conspiracy theory.

The three conspiracy theorists were ordered to pay €215,000 in May 2022, but the decision was reversed for one of the defendants on appeal the next year.

Van de Sanden also continued efforts to have the social media posts removed, as the three men failed to comply with the judgement.

Platform Twitter suspended one account after receiving a draft subpoena but did not abide by the municipality's request to remove all tweets promoting the conspiracy theory.

In turn, the municipality filed an injunction suit against Twitter.

The District Court of The Hague ruled in October 2022 that the company had done enough and that it would be too complex to have it filter all illegal content.

Reflecting on his work for the municipality, Van de Sanden wrote in an opinion piece that mayors have more possibilities than often believed to act on online calls to disrupt public order by drawing on civil rather than administrative law.

He studied Dutch law at Tilburg University between 2001 and 2006, and he was admitted to the bar in January 2007.

Van de Sanden completed his three-year Legal Profession Training Course (Beroepsopleiding Advocaat) as an intern at the law firms NautaDutilh and Loyens & Loeff, and he later worked for the firm AKD.

In 2009, after the Spatial Planning Act had been enacted, Van de Sanden and a colleague warned it could put thousands of construction projects on hold.

They argued exemptions to zoning plans granted by municipalities would not be valid under the new legislation in case a building permit had not yet been obtained, and they recommended the minister to add a grandfather clause.

He established his own solo practice in 2012 and was joined by criminal defense attorney Heleen Peters in November 2016 to form Van de Sanden & Peters Advocaten, located in Utrecht.

Van de Sanden is specialized in administrative law and has worked on cases related to spatial planning, environment, privacy, and law and order, and he has annotated cases for the legal journal Bouwrecht (Construction law).

In a 2015 opinion piece in the NRC Handelsblad, Van de Sanden and Peters criticized an amendment to the Aliens Employment Act that led to the immediate publication of companies fined in violation.

They complained companies that were later found to be innocent were not compensated for reputational damage.

Van de Sanden represented the municipality of Bodegraven-Reeuwijk in several cases that drew national media attention starting in 2021.

However, Van de Sanden and Peters also expressed that an expanded set of tools would be required for mayors, saying that parts of the relevant legislation stemmed from the 19th century and did therefore not consider the digital world.

Van de Sanden's partnership with Heleen Peters ended in September 2022, when they dissolved their firm and Van de Sanden founded SandenHartman with financial attorney Jesler Hartman Kok.