Article 273f, paragraph 1, subparagraph 3, of the Dutch Penal Code criminalizes, as trafficking in human beings, the act of recruiting, removing or abducting another person with the intention of inducing this person to make himself available, in another country, for the performance of sexual acts with or for a third party for remuneration. This provision, deriving from an international convention established in 1933, has always been a bit of an oddity in the Dutch penal provision on trafficking in human beings since it is not necessary to prove that the prostitute involved was lured or otherwise forced into prostitution and prostitution is legalized in the Netherlands. The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled in a landmark case in 2016, that the act criminalized in subparagraph 3 can only be punishable in situations where it can be said that the recruiting, removing or abduction of the prostitute occurred under circumstances that can be qualified as exploitation. This contribution sheds light on the historical backgrounds of this remarkable penal provision, its particularities and the recent case law of the Supreme Court. It demonstrates that the development of this provision and the discussion it sparks, embody the more general quest, in criminal law, to strike a balance between protecting individual liberty on the one side and protecting vulnerable persons on the other.

Crimmigration – the hybridization of criminal law and migration policy – is a transatlantic phenomenon. Despite this growing recognition, however, academic attention has thus far tended to focus more on discrete cases than on the similarities across regional contexts. In considering internal checkpoint stops conducted by US Border Patrol within the context of ongoing debates about racial profiling and policing of the internal border in the Schengen area, this article aims to provide a comparative lens by which to assess the questions at the heart of the current European discussion. An examination of both the jurisprudence and practice of the US internal border, this comparison suggests, offers a cautionary tale for European attempts to balance the fight against cross-border crime with the principles of human rights and the promise of a Europe free of internal frontiers.

Article 14 (4) of the Netherlands Nationality Act (RwN) gives the minister of Justice and Security the authority to revoke the Dutch citizenship if that person has voluntarily joined a terrorist organisation that is a threat to national security. In this article, which is based on an evaluation study of article 14 (4) commissioned by the Research and Documentation Center of the Ministry of Justice and Security, the authors discuss the decision-making process of revocation of the Dutch nationality based on article 14 (4) in practice. This article also provides empirical data on this decision-making process, such as on the number of times the Dutch nationality was revoked and the outcomes of court proceedings about article 14 (4) cases.

In the last decades, many Western countries have embraced an exclusionary stance towards non-members by increasingly relying on deportation. An important target of ‘crimmigration’ practices is represented by convicted foreign nationals, who are subject to deportation after serving their sentence. In Italy, trial judges can issue a deportation order towards convicted foreign nationals considered socially dangerous. This article examines whether and how deportation has found its space in judicial settings. Drawing on data collected in the court of Turin, this article sheds light on how structural and cultural traits of the Italian judicial system make deportation ‘a machine without an engine’.

Over the past decade, the concept of crimmigration has dominated legal and criminological understanding of contemporary immigration control. Drawing on the Netherlands as case study, this article provides a critical reflection on ‘crimmigration’ as both a policy trend and a scholarly trend. We argue that much of the existing scholarship has presented a one-dimensional understanding of crimmigration as a unilateral process singularly trending towards increasing punitiveness, securitization and exclusion. We examine a number of concrete examples illustrating the need for a more complex understanding that incorporates an analysis of the full range of actors and (counter)processes within the field of crimmigration.