No Ethics In Big Tech — Jurisdiction Series, Part One of Four
Published 22 August 2026 · ForeverPeaceNow.com / NoEthicsInBigTech.com
I cannot travel to four countries. I do not have the bandwidth, the budget, or the standing. So I am doing the next best thing: publishing the legal argument, in full, with every source checked, and giving it away.
This is the first of four. The Netherlands comes first because on the public record it is the strongest venue in Europe — and because the evidence that matters is deletable, and every month of delay costs something that cannot be recovered.
Why the Netherlands
Most attempts to bring international crimes cases against foreign corporations die at the first hurdle. They are framed as universal jurisdiction claims, and universal jurisdiction in the Netherlands is narrow: it reaches a suspect present in the country, a crime committed against a Dutch national, or a Dutch national suspect. A foreign technology group fits none of those.
But universal jurisdiction is not needed here. Ordinary territorial jurisdiction is available where any element of an offence occurred on Dutch soil — and on this point the company has spoken for itself.
On 25 September 2025, Microsoft published a statement on its own corporate blog. It said that its ongoing review had found evidence supporting elements of The Guardian’s reporting, and that this evidence included information relating to Israeli Ministry of Defence consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services. It said it had informed the Ministry that it was ceasing and disabling specified subscriptions and services.
That is a published statement by the company that the conduct in question touched Dutch territory. A Dutch prosecutor does not have to take a campaigner’s word for where the servers were. It is on the record, in the company’s own words, at a URL anyone can open.
What the reporting established
On 6 August 2025, The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call published a joint investigation drawing on leaked Microsoft documents and eleven sources inside Microsoft and Israeli military intelligence. It reported that Unit 8200 had used a customised Azure environment to store intercepted recordings of Palestinian phone calls from Gaza and the West Bank, and that by July 2025 roughly 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data — around 200 million hours of audio — sat in Microsoft data centres in the Netherlands, with a smaller share in Ireland. Sources within the unit told the reporters that the system had helped guide airstrikes in Gaza and shaped operations in the occupied territories.
Microsoft has said that at no point in the engagement was it aware of surveillance of civilians or the collection of their conversations using its services. Whether that is sustainable is exactly what an investigation with subpoena power exists to determine. It is not something a journalist or a campaigner can resolve. That is the whole point.
Three things Dutch law has that almost nowhere else in Europe does
Companies can be prosecuted. Article 51 of the Dutch Criminal Code applies corporate criminal liability in principle to all offences, including the core crimes under the International Crimes Act. Germany has no corporate criminal liability at all. Spain runs a closed list that excludes international crimes. The Netherlands does not.
Suppliers have been convicted before — twice. Frans van Anraat was convicted of complicity in war crimes for supplying chemical precursors used against Kurdish civilians in Iraq; the Court of Appeal of The Hague upheld it in 2007 and the Supreme Court in 2009. Guus Kouwenhoven was convicted of complicity in war crimes for supplying arms in Liberia by the Court of Appeal of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 2017. No other EU state has two such convictions.
A prosecutor’s refusal is not the end. Under Article 12 of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure, a directly interested party can complain to a Court of Appeal about a decision not to prosecute, and the court can order the prosecution to proceed. It has done exactly that: in December 2020 the Hague Court of Appeal ordered the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute the former chairman of a major Dutch bank after it had declined to charge any individual. In Spain, a refusal ends the matter. In the Netherlands it does not.
The honest part
I am not going to oversell this, because a document that oversells is a document no lawyer will use twice.
No corporation has ever been prosecuted in the Netherlands under the International Crimes Act. This would be the first. Attributing conduct to a Dutch subsidiary when the operative decisions were taken abroad is genuinely contested, and it is the strongest argument the other side has. And in the banking case above, the prosecution that the court compelled was ultimately discontinued in 2024 for insufficient evidence — the mechanism worked, and it still did not produce a conviction.
There is also a specific warning in the Dutch case law that anyone building this file needs to know. Van Anraat was acquitted of complicity in genocide. The courts found there was not enough evidence that he knew of the perpetrators’ genocidal intent when he made the supplies. On the same facts, they convicted him of complicity in war crimes. That is why the memorandum recommends pleading war crimes first, crimes against humanity in the alternative, and genocide in the further alternative. Not to soften the charge — I use the word genocide and I am not walking it back — but because a file that stands or falls on the single hardest element in international criminal law gives a prosecutor one clean reason to decline all of it.
What actually needs to happen first, and it is not a prosecution
It is preservation.
The material that would establish what was known and when — access logs, subscription records, contract documents, internal escalations — can be deleted, and reporting indicates a large volume of the underlying data was moved off European servers within days of the August 2025 publication. Nobody outside a prosecutor’s office can stop that. A preservation order can.
So the first request in any Dutch filing should be an order preserving the record. The substantive complaint follows. Get that sequence wrong and there may be nothing left to investigate by the time anyone agrees to investigate it.
The complainant problem, and what I can and cannot offer
Article 12 turns on there being a directly interested party. The provision extends to a legal person whose objectives and actual activities give it a directly affected interest — so an accountability organisation may qualify in its own right. That is the realistic route here.
I want to be precise about ParentsPlea. It is a casualty documentation resource built from Palestinian Ministry of Health data and independent research by my own team. It can support identifying victims, incidents and dates. It does not confer legal standing on anyone, and I am not going to imply that it does.
One thing I should say plainly about who I am
I am a United States person. In September 2025 the US Treasury designated three Palestinian human rights organisations on the SDN list under Executive Order 14203, blocking their property in US jurisdiction and prohibiting transactions by US persons. I therefore do not engage with those organisations and this project does not.
That is a constraint on me. It is not a constraint on Dutch lawyers, and I am not asking anyone to adopt it. I mention it because you should know what shaped these documents, and because everything in them is built from published court decisions and published journalism.
How to get the memorandum
The full memorandum — statutory basis, the Article 51 and Article 12 analysis, the Dutch supplier-complicity precedents with correct citations, the honest weaknesses, every source with a live link — is not posted publicly.
Use the contact form at NoEthicsInBigTech.com and ask for the Netherlands memorandum. I will send it. I would rather it reached people who intend to use it than sat where anyone can scrape it.
The three things behind this work
The petition to the Spanish Government and Prosecutor’s Office — a record of global demand for investigation, and a separate instrument from the legal arguments in this series. Available via actionnetwork.org or ForeverPeaceNow.com/Petition
ParentsPlea.com — the casualty record, compiled from Palestinian Ministry of Health data and my team’s own research.
NoEthicsInBigTech.com — the book, the company fact sheets, and the underlying research corpus.
As of 5 August 2026 the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported 73,381 people killed and 174,231 injured in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, including 1,254 killed since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, with an unknown number of victims remaining beneath rubble or in areas emergency responders have been unable to reach. Independent peer-reviewed research published in The Lancet Global Health indicates that figure is a conservative floor rather than an overcount. Every one of those people had a name. That is the only reason any of this exists.
Research credit: legal research, source verification and drafting support by Claude (Anthropic). All sources checked 22 August 2026. Not legal advice; I am not a lawyer.