The former top civil servant Arthur Docters van Leeuwen has passed away at the age of 75. He had been ill for quite some time. His death therefore comes as no surprise, says former minister Uri Rosenthal, who had been close friends with him for half a century.
Rosenthal calls Docters van Leeuwen “exceptionally intelligent and erudite”. Doctors van Leeuwen grew up in poor circumstances because his father died early. After his law studies, he started a lightning career with the government at a young age. In the early 1980s, as deputy director for the police force at the Ministry of the Interior, he was responsible for the instructions for violence during demonstrations by squatters and anti-nuclear activists.
From 1989 to 1995 he was head of the Internal Security Service, the predecessor of the AIVD. After that he was chairman of the Board of Procurators General, where he was fired in 1998 by Minister Sorgdrager of Justice after a conflict revolving around the question of who was in charge of the Public Prosecution Service. Subsequently, he was chairman of the board of the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets from 1999 to 2007.
Docters van Leeuwen also had political ambitions. He was a member of D66 for twenty years and was able to appear in the Lower House for the VVD in 2006. However, he withdrew because he was not satisfied with the tenth place on the list he got. He couldn’t accept that Fred Teeven, who had been his subordinate as a prosecutor, was higher on the list. Moreover, he thought that Teeven put too much emphasis on repression, Docters van Leeuwen was more concerned with prevention.
He also had literary ambitions. He published erotic stories, a fairytale book and a collection of poems. Rosenthal says that this shows that Docters van Leeuwen was at home in many markets and a creative man.
Docters van Leeuwen was also known as a powerful, but sometimes difficult to approach manager and as an ambitious man with a great workforce. “I had to and would succeed in life,” he said afterwards. His health, however, was shaky; at the age of 33 he had his first heart attack, something he himself attributed to his excessive assertiveness.
In recent years he worked at Rosenthal on a doctoral research, but due to his health complaints, he did not have enough energy to finish it.
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