Justice & Law Quote by Gijs de Vries

De Vries draws a bright line most democracies prefer to blur: policing is supposed to be legible, security is allowed to be opaque. The sentence is built like an institutional job description, but the subtext is a warning about incentives. Police information is designed to survive sunlight: rules of evidence, disclosure, defense challenges, a judge. It aims at conviction, which is both a moral claim (someone did something) and a procedural one (we can prove it publicly). Security services, by contrast, are framed as operating in a different economy of proof: suspicion over certainty, prevention over punishment, confidentiality over accountability.

That distinction does political work. It reassures voters that secrecy has a bounded, technocratic rationale while also implicitly asking for trust: accept that some information can’t be tested in court because revealing sources and methods would be worse than letting a case go. The rhetorical move is tidy, almost soothing, which is precisely why it matters; clean categories can sanitize messy realities like intelligence-led policing, secret evidence, watchlists, and information-sharing that quietly migrates from “national security” into everyday law enforcement.

As a European politician steeped in post-9/11 counterterrorism debates, de Vries is also defending a liberal democracy’s self-image: we can have robust security without turning the justice system into a closed tribunal. Yet the quote admits the pressure point: when security intelligence “does not necessarily” lead to prosecution, it can still shape lives through surveillance, travel restrictions, or preventive interventions with minimal public recourse. The line between keeping people safe and keeping the state unchallengeable is drawn here as principle, but it is policed in practice by oversight, transparency mechanisms, and political courage.