In this article, we inquire the merits of criminalizing blasphemy. We argue that religious views do not warrant a separate treatment compared to nonreligious ones. In addition, freedom of speech must be balanced against the interest of those who may be aggrieved by blasphemous remarks. We conclude that penalizing blasphemy is undesirable. It is fortunate, in that light, that acts of blasphemy have recently been decriminalized in The Netherlands by removing blasphemy as an offense from the Criminal Code. Still, other provisions appear to leave enough room to reach the same result, making the removal a possibly virtually aesthetic change. In the international context, it would be regrettable for The Netherlands to forgo the opportunity to take a leading role.

De auteurs gaan in op de vraag hoe het kan dat toezichthouders risico’s niet zien, risico’s onderschatten of te laat ingrijpen om risico’s te verminderen. Dit hoeft niet altijd voort te komen uit een gebrek aan deskundigheid, professionaliteit of kennis. Psychologische processen kunnen de effectiviteit van het toezicht ondermijnen, zonder dat de toezichthouder het merkt. De effecten van zogenoemde biases mogen niet worden onderschat.

Een interessant en moedig boek om het veelkoppige monster van de redelijkheid en billijkheid en de omstandigheden die de werking ervan beïnvloeden, beter in de greep te krijgen.

Impact assessments van voorgenomen Europese regelgeving staan al een tijdje in de belangstelling van beleidsmakers en onderzoekers. Dit is ook steeds meer het geval voor Europese ex-postwetsevaluaties, die door de Europese Commissie gezien worden als het sluitstuk van de ‘regelgevingcyclus’ in de Europese Unie. Dit artikel gaat in op de dekkingsgraad en kwaliteit van deze twee typen evaluaties en op de mate waarin zij momenteel op elkaar aansluiten, als noodzakelijke voorwaarden voor een geloofwaardige evidence-based regelgevingcyclus.

During the recent Senate debate about the constitutional state some senators expressed a concern about the tensions between the legislature and judiciary. The problems of overburdening, underfunding and instrumentalisation of the judiciary have a long history. The legislature has a tendency to overburden himself and the other powers of state, like the judiciary, notwithstanding the official policy to be reserved with regard to the responsibilities of government. The judiciary must adapt itself to an ever more prominent role in the constitutional state. The judiciary also has to generate its own legitimacy and cannot consider this to be a function of the legitimacy basis of the democratic legislator. The legislator for his part has all kinds of democratic wishes and expectations on how the judiciary can increase its own legitimacy basis by dealing quicker with more cases. In this context, the minister strongly adheres to the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied. The working methods of the judiciary have shown small and gradual steps in the direction of a more responsive and communicative procedure. However, the judiciary is not able to transform all its ideas into concrete initiatives and to transform successful initiatives into settled practices.

Vrijwel alle rechtenstudenten krijgen vroeg of laat in hun studie de opdracht om eens een kijkje te nemen bij de rechtbank. Er is echter niet of nauwelijks literatuur over hoe ze dat zouden kunnen aanpakken. Dit artikel beoogt in die leemte te voorzien. Het doel is om studenten methodologische bagage mee te geven, waarmee een observatieopdracht op een hoger niveau kan worden getild. Promovendi of andere onderzoekers die observatieonderzoek willen verrichten, kunnen daar ook hun voordeel mee doen.

The chaplaincy in penitentiary institutions shows a peculiar co-operation between the state and the religious communities. The chaplains provide a safe opportunity for supporting the detainees. The growing religious individualisation as well as a political rethinking of the role of religions institutions ask for system adaptations. In particular, the denominational approach is subject to discussion.

In this article, the author defends two propositions related to the concepts of free will and criminal responsibility. Free will is defined as the capability of distancing oneself from one’s immediate surroundings and reflect on impulses. The first proposition is that it is a mistake to suppose – as do many neuroscientists adhering to objectivist theories on the human mind – that the concept of free will refers to a postulated natural phenomenon, the existence of which could, in principle, be established or falsified. Instead, the concept of free will constitutes a practice; it is a human artefact that is part and parcel of the differing means by which mankind structures intersubjective life. The second proposition is that the criminal law legitimately presupposes that persons normally act out of free will and that they, consequently, are morally responsible and accountable for the wrongful actions they perform. The author claims that his arguments for both propositions are supported by insights from the neuroscientific fields of connectionism and embodied cognition.

This paper argues that to the extent that legal responsibility hinges on mental capacities – capacities which are implemented in (brain) mechanisms – scientists working in the fields of behavioural genetics and neuroscience can assist courts to adjudicate responsibility in several ways. First, by studying what mechanisms paradigmatically fully responsible agents possess and how those mechanisms operate. Second, by developing techniques to more individually, accurately and less subjectively inspect people’s mechanisms to gauge their true mental capacities. Third, by studying how youth, advanced age, and mental disorders affect these mechanisms. And fourth, by developing interventions to create, restore and enhance the function of these mechanisms in order to create, restore and enhance people’s responsibility-relevant mental capacities.

Human trafficking means exploitation; human smuggling is associated with illegal labour and a connection with exploitation is absent. Where a victim of human trafficking can appeal for legal protection, a smuggled migrant (illegally residing or with vulnerable legal status) overall has little rights because of the formal absence of the aspects of exploitation and coercion in human smuggling. In this article, the empirical analysis based on file analysis demonstrates that in several files of cases framed as human smuggling indications are found for exploitation of migrants, although this has not been recognised as such. Theoretically the authors tie this to the trend of crimmigration. Measures designed to combat human trafficking and smuggling are often concentrated on (criminal) law enforcement and criminal punishment, to the detriment of a human rights-based approach. The tension between immigration policy and the combat against human trafficking deserves more attention.

International studies show that children of teenage mothers are at elevated risk for offending. This study investigates the effect of early and late parenthood of mothers and fathers on offspring delinquency. The results confirm results from earlier studies and show that early fatherhood does not add to offending risk over and above early motherhood. Factors like family instability, family size and parental delinquency do not account for the association between early motherhood and delinquency. The elevated risk of offending applies to all children of young mothers, not just to the first-born children. Late parenthood is not associated with offspring delinquency.

This article is directed towards two important lines of research in contemporary criminology, more specifically the growing attention for the period of young adulthood and the focus on the concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. This study examines in a quantitative manner the extent to which both ‘structure’ (operationalized in terms of social-economic status and objective transitions) and ‘agency’ (measured as the perception of personal agency and subjective transitions) are related to delinquency in the period of young adulthood. A representative sample of 1,477 Flemish young adults between the age of 18 and 25 years is used. The results of the analyses offer some empirical proof to integrate the concept of ‘agency’ in future theoretical models for the explanation of individual differences in delinquency and also lead to additional suggestions to further examine the interaction between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’.

In recent discussions on ‘citizenship’, the concept is oddly dealt with as if it would have originated shortly before the French Revolution and would have meaning in a nation state context only. During at least seven centuries before that, however, it had a crucial importance in the development of Western-European cities. Citizenship, being primarily based on an exclusion from the jurisdiction of local rulers (privilege) which then opens opportunities for the inclusion of citizens in systems of self-rule, has been closely connected with law as from the start. In the article a model developed by Sassen (2006) is used to reconstruct the development of ‘citizenship’ with special reference to the transfer of its elements, often with a considerable change of meaning and function, from one into the other of the four social formations to be distinguished. It is argued that an extended perspective, that acknowledges citizenship and law before its usurpation by the nation state, may be relevant to our assessment of recent developments towards ‘transnational’ forms of citizenship.