On July 1st 2016 a law entered into force that gives the victim or survivors of serious crimes the right to speak unrestrictedly in court. Where the victim or survivors used to be only permitted to make a statement on the consequences of the crime for them, the recent amendment of the law permits them to speak about the evidence, the legal qualification of the crime, the culpability of the offender and the appropriate punishment as well. Discussions on the introduction or extension of the victim’s right to speak mainly focused on the consequences of victim statements on the procedural consequences and on the consequences for the victim. Little attention is paid to the consequences for the offender. This article reports the findings of a systematic literature review on the relation between a victim statement and the imposed punishment. The findings from the American studies show that a victim statement aggravates sentencing outcomes. How desirable is that? For answering that question, more research is needed, which the legislator has not wanted to wait for.

Following the earlier work of the Dutch political scientist Middendorp on conservative views among the Dutch population, this study tries to find out if there is still a relationship between conservatism and religion. Earlier research revealed that also church members became less conservative over time and that the gap between church members and non-church members is closing in this respect. Only orthodox Christians continued to hold more conservative views over time. A distinction which still exists today as the results of this study among evangelical Christians show. This group of orthodox Christians distinguishes itself from both mainline Christians and the secular Dutch not so much by having a conservative outlook on economic matters, but by upholding conservative views in pro life issues.

The contribution assesses Germany’s better regulation system as quality assurance system. At first, the paper outlines the development of the system over the last years and describes its main characteristics. The introduction of the Nationaler Normenkontrollrat (National Regulatory Control Council) in 2006 can be seen as a cornerstone in this respect. The competency of the National Regulatory Control Council was extended in 2011 and a new concept of cost measurement of regulatory costs - compliance costs - was introduced. The new concept captures not only the costs arising from information obligations, but all compliance costs of a regulation. Secondly, the paper discusses the challenges to the better regulation system, in particular, those due to Germany’s federal structure providing in most legislative areas for a separation of actual law making at the federal level and execution of laws by the German Länder (and their municipalities).

Tax revenues are used to invest in sustainable development and economic growth in order to strengthen the effective functioning of the state, combat poverty, deliver public services and achieve other goals. This also applies to developing countries. However, developing countries and, in particular, the so-called Small Islands Development States (SIDS), including Curaçao, face many challenges in achieving these goals. SIDS additionally face other challenges because of their specific social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities. SIDS should focus on strengthening domestic resource mobilization. Despite their progress in improving tax systems, international regulations such as CRS, FATCA, BEPS have brought new challenges.

This paper uses social network analysis to study and compare the organizational structures and division of roles of three jihadist networks in the Netherlands. It uses unique Dutch police data covering the 2000-2013 period. This study demonstrates how the organizational structures differ between different networks. The earliest network has a hierarchical cell structure with a clear division of labour, while the later networks are horizontal and dense networks with less clear orientation on tasks. The core member types in the jihadist networks also differ. The earliest network contains international jihad veterans with clear leadership skills, while the later networks contain home-grown radicals with less status and often a lack of expertise. Furthermore, several jihadists evolve over time, when they used to be supporters, but become core members in posterior networks.

Cannabis Social Clubs (CSCs) are a model of non-profit production and distribution of cannabis among a closed circuit of adult cannabis users. The CSC model can thus be seen as a middle-ground option between prohibition and full (legal) commercialization. Initially founded in Spain during the 1990s, this form of collectives has emerged elsewhere in Europe (notably in Belgium), mainly as a result of grassroots initiatives and self-regulation. Uruguay remains the only jurisdiction to have legalized and regulated the CSC model. This paper discusses the goals and practices of CSCs against the backdrop of the drug user movement. Our goal is to draw a comparison to other drug users’ organizations and to identify knowledge gaps to be addressed in future research into CSCs. In this analysis, we rely on a review of the relevant literature in this field and on preliminary findings from an ongoing study examining CSCs in Belgium. A preoccupation with reducing the harms associated with drug use seems to be an underlying guiding principle for CSCs and other drug users’ organizations, but further research into CSCs’ practices is needed to understand whether and how those are implemented. We found other common points between the broader drug user movement and the efforts of CSCs, both in terms of potential pitfalls and areas for positive impact. We suggest that the model warrants additional attention from both the research and policy-making community.

Sensitive interviews involve emotionally difficult topics which require participants to face issues that are deeply personal and possibly distressing. This paper draws together reflections concerning how researchers manage the challenges of conducting sensitive interviews, including the author’s own reflections concerning interviewing clinical negligence claimants. First, it examines the ethical guidelines that regulate sensitive research, and the challenges of obtaining informed consent and maintaining confidentiality. Ethical guidelines, however, provide limited assistance for ensuring the emotional care of research participants, and we also consider challenges that are not usually formally regulated. These include preparing for the interview, and then ensuring the emotional care of participants both during and after the interview itself. Sensitive research also raises deeper ethical issues concerning the negotiation of relations between researcher and participant, especially when this relationship is unequal. Finally, while previous research has generally focused on the need to take emotional care of research participants, less attention has been given to the emotional needs of researchers. It is argued that support systems for researchers are too often ad hoc, and that providing support is often not a priority of granting bodies, grant holders or supervisors, and that formal systems need to be put in place.

Over the last decades the number of people who have been detained on the suspicion of terrorism has significantly grown. This has resulted in an increased scholarly interest in the topic of prisons and terrorism. However, the main focus of academic research has been the period of incarceration. Especially the question whether terrorists should be isolated from other prisoners has received considerable scientific attention. What happens after their release still remains opaque. In this article some preliminary insights will be shared on particular aspects of the societal reintegration of former suspected terrorist detainees. It presents some of the obstacles, dilemmas and opportunities. These insights where obtained through semi-structured interviews with both professionals and former detainees with a jihadist background.

In order to understand why people can turn to violence to achieve political or societal changes, it is important to examine factors that can trigger a process of radicalization. In this article the authors outline such a model of trigger factors. In this model they specify trigger factors at the micro level (individual level), meso level (group level), and macro level (societal level). In addition, the authors argue that it is important to take into account personal characteristics, such as age, gender, and the type of motivation, behind a radicalization process. With respect to these types of motivation, the authors distinguish between sensation seekers, justice seekers, identity seekers, and meaning seekers. This model enables to discern triggers in the radicalization process of specific people in specific contexts.

This paper uses the UK as a vehicle through which to argue that a dominant reductionist drugs discourse exists which simplifies understandings of drug use and drug users leading to socio-cultural misrepresentations of harm, risk and dangerousness. It contends that at the centre of this discourse lies the process of othering – the identification of specific substances and substance users as a threat to UK society. Interestingly, within the wider context of global drug policy reform this othering process appears to be expanding to target a wider variety of factors and actors – those policies, research findings and individuals which contest normative notions, resulting in the marginalisation of ‘alternative voices’ which question the entrenched assumptions associated with drug prohibition. The paper concludes that there is a need for collective action by critical scholars to move beyond the other, calling for academics to be innovative in their research agendas, creative in their dissemination of knowledge and resolute despite the threat of being othered themselves.

Herman Bianchi, who passed away on the 30th of December 2015, has been a true ‘significant other’ for cultural criminologists. This article is a ‘criminological Verstehen’ of Bianchi’s work. His general attitude towards criminology is characterised by a mix of academic analysis, emotional outrage and incongruities. In order to understand this, his contributions to criminology are linked to biographical notes and to the mixed reactions he got on his work. Bianchi played an important role in the establishment of criminology as an autonomous academic discipline, yet he was very critical of this ‘discipline of shame’ because it has always served the exclusion of the most vulnerable members of society. He has been one of the frontmen of critical criminology, but he was not a Marxist. His concern for the despised other is related to his eternal fear, as a gay man in a ‘closet with a revolving door’, of new waves of discrimination against gays, and his rigorous abolitionism to his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi-concentration camp in 1944. Bianchi’s historical interest led him at the end of his career in the 1980s to support the emergence of strong historical criminol­ogy, but his utilitarian use of historical studies, also resulted in some clashes with professional historians.

Inspecteurs en toezichthoudende organisaties staan dagelijks voor lastige beslissingen. Het bepalen van wat uiteindelijk ‘goed toezicht’ is, vergt naast regelgeving, vakinhoudelijke kennis en protocollen ook morele afwegingen. In inspectieorganisaties is doorgaans geen tijd en expertise voor een methodische reflectie op de morele dimensie van het werk. Om te onderzoeken of moreel beraad een bijdrage kan leveren aan de omgang met morele vragen in de dagelijkse toezichtpraktijk is een exploratieve pilotstudie uitgevoerd binnen de Inspectie voor de Gezondheidszorg.

In their article Mirjam Beyers and Suzan Langenberg discuss the possibilities of family group conferencing in case of divorce. They start their article with an introduction to the phenomenon of family group conferencing.

In this article Bie Vanseveren and Inge Vanfraechem outline and discuss the practice of a Hergo with juveniles in Belgium.

This article investigates the functioning of the Dutch National Contact Point (NCP) during the specific instance procedure based on shared experiences of parties involved in a specific instance procedure, the stipulations of the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the Dutch Government Decree 2014. NCPs function as a unique implementation mechanism of these guidelines by providing mediation and conciliation services during specific instance procedures. The recent debate in the Netherlands on the functioning of the Dutch NCP and the lack of rigorous up-to-date research necessitate further research on this topic. Hence, this article shares more in-depth knowledge about the functioning of the Dutch NCP, contributes to the ongoing debate in Parliament and in the OECD on the functioning of NCPs, and presents suggestions for further improvement.

In recent years, there has been much discussion on the legal aid cuts and reforms in England and Wales, and the possible consequences this would have on access to justice for vulnerable groups in society, including immigrants and asylum seekers. This contribution focuses on one element of the English legal aid system: merits testing by legal aid providers in asylum cases. It explores whether and, if so, how this aspect may affect the access to justice for asylum seekers lacking the financial means to pay privately for legal assistance and representation. The findings indicate that a merits test which makes access to legal aid on appeal conditional upon a case having at least 50% prospect of success and makes legal aid providers responsible for conducting this assessment may compromise asylum seekers’ ability to achieve justice both within and outside the existing body of law.

In this article several perspectives on studying taboos within social sciences are described. Originally, taboo, a concept that was already used within Polynesian societies early 1800, referred to food that was not allowed to eat. Anthropologists analyzed taboos especially in a functionalistic manner, as contributing to the maintenance of existing power balances within societies. These and other studies on taboos all illustrate the fact that taboos are very much a social construction and are very much time and place dependent. In contemporary western societies taboos are associated with ‘open secrets’ and ‘silencing’. Within criminology certain topics are considered taboo as a research object (e.g. explaining crime through ethnic, cultural or religious characteristics), while others claim that there are no criminological research taboos left.

This article describes the European research project ALTERNATIVE, which studies the possible implementation of restorative justice approaches in intercultural conflicts. Besides theoretical research into concepts such as justice, security, conflict (transformation) and restorative justice, action-research was implemented in four diverse intercultural settings (Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Northern Ireland). In order to compare those settings, an innovative comparative research method was developed through which the various realities are ‘thickly described’ within evaluation grids. The article describes the different aspects of the research and reflects upon the question whether a more broad understanding of restorative justice, surpassing the judicial sector and aspects, is emerging.

De centrale vraag in deze twee prejudiciële verwijzingen was of belanghebbenden, eigenaren van respectievelijk een kasteel in België en een landgoed in het Verenigd Koninkrijk, gebruik konden maken van Nederlandse belastingvoordelen voor het behoud van nationaal cultureel en natuurlijk erfgoed. De Nederlandse belastingautoriteiten meenden van niet, waarna in beroep de vraag is of dit een beperking vormt van het vrij verkeer van X en Q (de vrijheid van vestiging, respectievelijk het vrije kapitaalverkeer). Het Hof van Justitie was van oordeel dat geen sprake was van een ongeoorloofde inbreuk op het vrij verkeer, aangezien de situaties van X en Q niet objectief vergelijkbaar zijn met die van een ingezetene die een monument dan wel een landgoed in Nederland bezit.
HvJ 18 december 2014, zaak C-87/13, Staatssecretaris van Financiën/X, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2459 HvJ 18 december 2014, zaak C-133/13, Staatssecretaris van Economische Zaken en Staatssecretaris van Financiën/Q, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2460