Mpanzu Bamenga


Panzu "Mpanzu" Bamenga is a Congolese-born Dutch jurist, human rights activist and politician of the Democrats 66, who has served as a member of the Dutch House of Representatives since 2023. He previously held a seat in the municipal council of Eindhoven from 2014 to 2018, and from 2021 to 2022.
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Biography

Bamenga was born in Kinshasa, Zaire. In 1994, at the age of 8, he fled to the Netherlands with his mother and brother, where he lived as an undocumented refugee for thirteen years. He completed his pre-vocational secondary education at the Christiaan Huygens College in Eindhoven and subsequently followed an administrative-legal training secondary vocational education at the Summa College from 2001 to 2005. Bamenga subsequently obtained his bachelor's degree in law at the Avans-Fontys Law School in Tilburg University and studied European immigration and asylum law at the Université libre de Bruxelles and Dutch law at the Radboud University. In 2007, he was granted a residence permit by Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin.
In 2020, he sued the Dutch government along with human rights organizations and another citizen for racial profiling, after he had been selected for an inspection by the Royal Marechaussee at Eindhoven Airport. Bamenga was informed that the agency was looking for criminals and non-Dutch citizens, and he noted that all other selected individuals were people of color. The Hague Court of Appeal concluded that the Royal Marechaussee had engaged in racial discrimination, and it ruled that the agency was not allowed to use racial features during inspections. For his legal battle, Bamenga won an annual prize awarded by the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights in 2021.
On 22 November 2023, he ran in the 2023 general election as the ninth candidate on the D66 list, and was elected into the House of Representatives. He was installed as MP on 6 December 2023, and he became his party's spokesperson for foreign trade, development cooperation, discrimination, integration, infrastructure, and environment. Along with Willem Koops, he introduced a bill in December 2024 to explicitly prohibit racial profiling during fraud detection and criminal investigations. They argued insufficient protection against the practice existed despite the Constitution's discrimination ban and other anti-discrimination legislation.

House committees