Parliament
Tweede Kamer
The Dutch House of Representatives publishes its documents openly and also makes them available through an open-data portal with an OData API. Tweedekamer.nl carries motions, amendments, government letters, written parliamentary questions, bills, plenary records, committee reports, decision lists, voting results and ministerial commitments. We use the source for the parliamentary handling of a file: what was tabled, asked, promised and adopted.
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LEO — Direct consultation
The source is consulted directly while the work is being done.
BEVER — Direct consultation
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IRMA — Direct consultation
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What this source does not give you
Search runs against a document's subject field. Documents tied to a single bill — the explanatory memorandum, the committee report and the government's reply to it — carry a generic subject label and therefore cannot be found by theme; for legislative history you need the official publications channel. Substantively: a parliamentary document is neither statutory text nor case law. An adopted motion is a political statement, not law.
Legal domains for which LEO consults this source
Dutch legal domains; each link opens the domain page on leo.prudai.com.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I find a bill's explanatory memorandum here?
- Not by topic. Search runs over a document's subject field, and for documents tied to a bill that field holds the document type rather than the theme — 'explanatory memorandum', 'report', 'reply to the report'. The bill itself sits in the title, and that field is not searched. For legislative history, use the official publications channel.
- Is an adopted motion binding?
- Not legally. A motion expresses an opinion or a request of the House; the government may act on it, advise against it, or set it aside. It can carry weight as an indication of legislative intent or as political context, but it creates no rights or obligations.
- Which document types are reliably findable by topic?
- Those with a descriptive subject: motions, government letters, written questions and their answers, amendments, and the reports of general and written consultations. Those are exactly the documents you need to reconstruct how parliament handled a topic.
- Is this source switched on by default in LEO?
- No. In LEO the House of Representatives sits in an optional source pack that can be switched on or off in the knowledge-source settings. With the pack off, the source is not consulted and does not appear in citations. In BEVER and IRMA it belongs to the standard set of governmental sources.
- Where does the data come from?
- From the House of Representatives' own open-data portal, which offers an OData API for targeted queries in JSON and a synchronisation feed in XML for those maintaining the data in their own database. We query it at the moment of the question; no copy of the archive is kept.