De Nederlandse veehouderij staat volop in de aandacht door kwesties als mestfraude, dierenwelzijnskwesties en stikstofnormen. Dit roept vragen op omtrent regelnaleving onder Nederlandse veehouders, zoals welke regels zij al dan niet naleven en welke verklaringen hiervoor te geven zijn. Om deze vraag te beantwoorden is gebruikgemaakt van de data die zijn verzameld in het kader van drie casestudies naar regelnaleving onder varkenshouders, pluimveehouders en de betrokkenheid daarbij van dierenartsen. Deze studies laten zien dat de betrokken veehouders over het geheel genomen allemaal wel eens regels overtreden. Neutralisaties, strain en persoonlijke en sociale normen spelen daarbij een rol. De inzichten die deze studies opleveren, bieden diverse aanknopingspunten voor het versterken van toezicht.

Racism is related to the process of ‘othering’. Individual people or groups can be described as ‘other’ by depicting them as ‘beasts’. In another form of othering accusations of maltreatment of other than human animals play an important role: awful people abuse innocent animals. Next to that concepts like ‘genocide’ and ‘slavery’ are nowadays used in order to describe the way humans treat other animals. All of this influences the debate on racism.

This article aims to clarify the phenomenon of iconoclasm and how it impacts today’s society, in spite of the lack of research on this topic. After establishing its complex and sensitive nature, a first assessment containing types of iconoclasm and various motives of iconoclasts is presented. Different forms of iconoclasm are distinguished, explained and illustrated using examples. Special attention is given to the subject’s sensitivity in modern society while establishing the connection of the topic with identity in multiple shapes and forms. The article aims at contributing to a future multi-disciplinary debate.

The overexploitation of nature has led to anthropogenic defaunation, which results in complex socioeconomic, political and ecological consequences. Influenced by the economic growth of modernization and the interconnectedness of globalization, zoonotic diseases emerge as incalculable side effects of defaunation. By rejecting anthropocentric worldviews, this article critically examines anthropogenic defaunation and the causes and consequences of the coronavirus pandemic from a green criminological perspective.

In our daily decision-making processes, attitudes play an important role. An attitude is an evaluative judgement of a person, object or an issue on a scale of favorability. A large amount of research has been done on the role of attitudes in our daily decision-making processes. There is, however, a gap in empirical knowledge when it concerns the role of attitudes in the professional judicial decision-making process. It has been accepted that the professional judicial decision-making process has a subjective element, but this subjective element remains unexplained. Attitudes are inherently personal and subjective, and they can make our decision-making process easier. They can, however, also be the basis for biases and prejudices. Herein lies a potential risk, especially in the professional judicial decision-making process. If attitudes play a role in the decision-making process of judges there is a possibility that impartiality, one of the judiciary’s core professional values, might be unobtainable. To see whether attitudes play a role in the professional judicial decision-making process semi-structured interviews will be conducted among judges, who will also be asked to fill in a scenario survey. Hopefully the obtained data will lead to a start in filling this gap in empirical knowledge.

Every mediator has to act independently and impartially. These are core values of mediation. However, what if a mediator tries to enrich himself? The aim of this contribution is to shed light on some correction mechanisms under the Belgian law of obligations, focusing on the latest developments in the case law of the Belgian Supreme Court.

The decision of the Court that Muslims from the Greek province of West Thrace can choose in matters of family law between civil or Islamic law, is not surprising. However, much can be said about the way in which the Court came to that conclusion. Because in doing so it uses principles and considerations that show a lack of insight in the status and functioning of a unique legal system, namely that of interpersonal law, or the coexistence on equal basis of several family laws. Similarly, the Court seems biased towards Islamic family law, which it consistently refers to as ‘sharia’. A critical discussion of this judgment is therefore appropriate.

This article discusses the Belgian perspective on the Dutch ‘ZAM/ACB research on possibilities and impediments for commercial mediation’ which was undertaken by the Montaigne Centre of the University of Utrecht. In Belgium bMediation, the Federal Mediation Committee and the Ghent University periodically monitor the practice of mediation in Belgium with the instrument of the 'Bemiddelingsbarometer'. It turns out that parties and their advisers in both Belgium and the Netherlands still prefer a traditional judicial approach instead of mediation, mostly because of a lack of information.

Studies have shown that the effects of scientific research on law and policy making are often fairly limited. Different reasons can be given for this: scientists are better at falsifying hypothesis than at predicting the future, the outcomes of academic research and empirical evidence can be inconclusive or even contradictory, the timing of the legislative cycle and the production of research show mismatches, there can be clashes between the political rationality and the economic or scientific rationality in the law making process et cetera. There is one ‘wicked’ methodological problem, though, that affects all regulatory policy making, namely: the ‘jump’ from empirical facts (e.g. there are too few organ donors in the Netherlands and the voluntary registration system is not working) to normative recommendations of what the law should regulate (e.g. we need to change the default rule so that everybody in principle becomes an organ donor unless one opts out). We are interested in how this translation process takes place and whether it could make a difference if the empirical research on which legislative drafts are build is more quantitative type of research or more qualitative. That is why we have selected two cases in which either type of research played a role during the drafting phase. We use the lens of the proportionality principle in order to see how empirical data and scientific evidence are used by legislative drafters to justify normative choices in the design of new laws.

The question central to this article is whether ‘Islam’ and human rights are compatible and, if not, whether there might be room to come to a minimum standard of human rights that can be shared globally. This article will demonstrate that, from the perspective of Islamic orthodoxy, principles that are fundamental to human rights, like equality and freedom of religion, pose unsurmountable problems, and the adjustment of these principles is theologically nearly impossible. However, a growing number of Muslim intellectuals holds the opposite view, using new theological methods to argue that these Islamic principles and human rights are compatible. Although they are warmly welcomed by human rights lawyers and activists, their methods are not uncontroversial, and they are still very small in number.

Criminology traditionally focuses on the human experience. However, several criminologists have seriously criticized this anthropocentric perspective. In their view from a criminological perspective humans and other than human animals should be given equal attention. Although they advocate a non-speciesist criminology, they are not trying to fundamentally change criminology as we know it. Instead, their appeal is to not consider other than human creatures as passive objects and solely from the perspective of their usefulness for humans. Yet, this objective poses substantial methodological challenges to criminologists.

This article starts off with an exposé of what ‘theoretical innovation’ means in the social sciences. The development of criminology is considered to be a result of (1) historical and cultural developments, (2) political-economic developments, (3) developments in other academic disciplines and (4) reactions to or specifications of other theoretical perspectives in criminology itself. Paradigm shifts in criminology are characterised by an individualistic and positivist aetiological turn in its early days; a sociological turn towards a ‘criminology of the lawmaker’ from the late 1950s on; and a return to positivism in the neoliberal and neoconservative turn of the 1990s. The new century ushers in a new epistemological break in criminology, in which globalisation, global warming, migration, human rights and the implications of cyberspace ‘force’ criminologists to overcome their anthropocentric and colonial character biases.

Op 6 maart 2018 heeft het Hof van Justitie zijn oordeel geveld in de Achmea-zaak. Deze langverwachte uitspraak maakt een (voorlopig) einde aan een heet hangijzer, namelijk de discussie over de rechtsgeldigheid – in het EU-recht – van arbitrageclausules in investeringsverdragen gesloten tussen twee lidstaten van de Europese Unie (EU), de zogenoemde intra-EU-BIT’s. Het Hof van Justitie verklaart arbitrageclausules in intra-EU-investeringsverdragen in strijd met de artikelen 267 en 344 VWEU. De uitspraak van het Hof van Justitie is voor de Commissie, die sinds enkele jaren een actief beleid voert om een einde te maken aan investeringsverdragen tussen EU-lidstaten, zonder meer welkom. De lidstaten van de EU zullen thans weinig ruimte hebben om die intra-EU-BIT’s te behouden, maar de vraag blijft evenwel wat het effect van de uitspraak zal zijn op aanhangige en toekomstige arbitrages op basis van dergelijke verdragen.
HvJ 6 maart 2018, zaak C-284/16, Slowakische Republiek/Achmea B.V., ECLI:EU:C:2018:158.

Changing ecological conditions in a globalizing world pose new challenges for human societies. Global warming, large-scale pollution, deforestation and species extinction have increasingly become topics on the international agenda. Even though many of these harmful activities are criminogenic, criminology pays rather little attention to environmental crimes and harms.
Therefore, this article discusses the anthropocentric perspective within criminology and argues that a non-anthropocentric criminology can lead to new theoretical insights.

In the media one notices items on mistreatment of animals on a regular basis. These can cause intense agitation in the society. Think of the many horses that have been abused throughout the country in 2012. This case remains unsolved to this day. The question is: who does this, who are the animal abusers, what are their characteristics and backgrounds? After a long search in several registration systems of many institutions the characteristics and backgrounds of 97 animal abusers have been found. The data of the institutions have also been used to create an image of the nature and extent of animal abuse. Subsequently there have been interviews with several experts from different organisations to record their knowledge and experience and to indicate the results. The characteristics and backgrounds of the animal abusers are diverse. Their ages range from 7 to 85 years. The offenders are an average of 34 years old at the time of committing the animal abuse. Animal abusers are not notorious criminals. Half is reported to be the first offender according to police data. The other half commits all forms of crime. This includes the share of capital offenses (34%) and violent crimes (23%). Dogs are most often abused. The motives are diverse. Disappearing anger and frustration seems to be an important reason to abuse animals. Only nine people found that there was domestic violence in addition to animal abuse. An initial classification of types of animal traffickers in, amongst others, group planners, loners and sadists, has to be empirically substantiated.