Al jaren daalt in Nederland de vaccinatiegraad, waardoor ziekten als mazelen en de bof opnieuw dreigen de kop op te steken. Om dit tegen te gaan zijn recent in de Nederlandse politiek twee meer verplichtende maatregelen voorgesteld. Dit artikel analyseert de juridische mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van deze voorstellen, met name in de context de van de grondrechten waarmee ze zouden kunnen botsen: artikel 2 EVRM (recht op leven), artikel 8 EVRM (onaantastbaarheid van het lichaam) en/of artikel 9 EVRM: (vrijheid van godsdienst en levensovertuiging) en het daaruit volgende Nederlandse gelijkebehandelingsrecht.

This paper is largely an endorsement and a further elaboration of Cohen’s critical discussion of the Hobby Lobby and Hosanna-Tabor cases and the conceptual overstretch of religious freedom they embody. I disagree with Cohen, however, on the proper interpretation of this debate. Cohen construes the ominous Court cases as an anti-liberal attack on the liberal state order. My main thesis is that the root of this dispute can be traced back to a fault line within liberalism between a more tolerance-leaning and a more equality-leaning tradition. I argue that the ominous cases are instances of the tolerance-leaning tradition in liberalism, which once was characteristic of the liberal tradition. Still, I agree with Cohen that this tradition should be rejected because it reverts to an obsolete interpretation of religious freedom that defends unwarranted privileges for certain groups that are out of sync with the egalitarian underpinnings of contemporary liberal political orders.

Citizenship is a notoriously complex and an essentially contested concept which has been defined in many different ways. The only stable element in all these definitions seems to be that citizenship is primarily described in terms of the relationship between the political community and the citizen. This article aims to explain why citizenship is such a contested concept by showing that it is embedded in three very different normative traditions: the liberal conception of citizenship as a (legal) status, the republican conception of citizenship as an activity and the communitarian conception of citizenship as identity. Each approach emphasizes an important element of citizenship, but none of the three is comprehensive enough to provide a complete picture of what citizenship implies in contemporary constitutional democracies. At the same time they cannot simply be merged because they come from different normative traditions among themselves at odds with each other.This article starts by illustrating the three conceptions of citizenship on the basis of the underlying theoretical models: liberalism, republicanism and communitarianism. Section 3 discusses two mutual tensions between different conceptions of citizenship: first between the liberal and republican conception and then between the liberal and republican conception on the one hand and the communitarian conception on the other. In Section 4, this conceptual analysis is used to analyze a policy terrain that is explicitly embedded in the idea of citizenship, namely the integration of immigrants through naturalization policy. Section 5 concludes.

For many legal scholars it goes without saying that legal and legal-philosophical theories originate in specific societal contexts and that this contextual character should always be taken into consideration. This implies, for example, that we should take the differences between the common law and civil law tradition seriously. This paper acknowledges the importance of such differences for legal analysis in general, but argues that this acknowledgement is less urgent for legal-philosophical analyses, since they primarily focus on what both traditions share, namely, a foundation in liberal-democratic principles.

(1) De auteur bespreekt het consultatiedocument houdende wijziging van het Besluit openbare biedingen Wft en een aantal andere recente wetgeving(sinitiatieven) met relevantie voor de openbare-overnamepraktijk.