Illegal use by tenants? Landlords are not always responsible for this!

In its ruling of October 17, 2025, the Midden-Nederland District Court ruled that a landlord is not automatically liable if a tenant uses the rented property in violation of laws and regulations. 

This ruling concerned an apartment that was being used for a sex business without the necessary permit. The municipality had received a report about possible prostitution in an apartment. After an inspection, it appeared that a sex business was indeed being operated in the apartment without the necessary permit. Both the mayor and the municipal executive therefore imposed an order subject to a penalty on the landlords of the apartment. 

The question that had to be answered by the court was whether the landlords could be regarded as functional perpetrators in this case. Established case law of the Administrative Law Division of the Council of State stipulates that a person is a functional perpetrator if they had control over the violation and accepted that violation, for example by not preventing the violation when they could have done so. 

The court ruled that the landlords had control over the use of the property because they were the owners. They therefore had control over the violation. 

However, the violation was not accepted by the landlords, or at least the municipality had not provided sufficient evidence of this. The municipality based its case on reports from which it was unclear who had made them, when, and how, which meant that the only thing that could be established was that the sex business had been operated from the property for a period of two weeks. In addition, the court also ruled that the landlords had actively supervised the property and had no reason to expect that the apartment would be used illegally. 

The court therefore ruled that the landlords had been wrongly designated as functional perpetrators and that the order subject to a penalty for non-compliance should not have been imposed on them. 

This ruling underscores that a landlord is not automatically responsible for what a tenant does and that the concept of functional perpetration is therefore not unlimited. 

You can read the ruling here.