Het rapport ‘Aanpak coronacrisis – Deel 1’ van de Onderzoeksraad voor Veiligheid (OvV) analyseert de aanpak van de COVID-19-crisis tot 1 september 2020. Deze bijdrage analyseert de juridische dimensies van de pandemische paraatheid, de formele crisisstructuur en kwetsbare ouderen en doet enige suggesties ter versterking van onder meer de Wet publieke gezondheid (Wpg).

In 2020, a coalition against ethnic profiling established a taskforce to handle complaints of people who have experienced ethnic profiling by the Dutch Royal Military Police and/or the Dutch Customs at airports. In this article, 31 complaints that have been received between February 2020 and March 2021 have been analyzed in a qualitative way. The results show that when people with an ethnic stigma are not informed (properly) about why they have been selected, stopped and searched, and treated as suspects instead of false positives, they feel racially profiled, yet take little or no further action in addition to the complaints.

In deze bijdrage bespreekt de auteur het op 15 december 2021 gepubliceerde Rapport monitoring boekjaar 2020 van de Monitoring Commissie Corporate Governance Code. In dit rapport wordt verslag gedaan over de Corporate Governance Code en de naleving daarvan over boekjaar 2020. De nadruk ligt op betekenisvolle verslaggeving binnen vijf kernthema’s: langetermijnwaardecreatie, risicobeheersing, cultuur, diversiteit en bezoldiging van bestuurders.

This article examines the use of citizen participation in urgent missing person cases. The Theory of Planned Behavior was used to examine which specific considerations investigators have in this regard and which have the greatest influence on the choice of whether or not to involve citizens. The findings suggest that this choice is primarily attitude-driven. Detectives are predominantly positive about participation, but see harm to the investigation as the main risk. A practical implication is to focus collaboration primarily on professionally organized groups of citizens to reduce (perceived) risks.

In the past years important changes have occurred in police work in the Netherlands and Belgium. These developments, and new questions that arose because of these developments, are the reason we dedicate a special issue to ‘the police and citizen in a changing context’. In this introduction of this issue, we describe a number of developments and new questions. We address the changing distance between police officers and citizens, authority and trust, the role of citizens, technology and digitization and growing complexity and diversity. In addition, the articles in this special issue are introduced.

Since 2004, cell sharing in Dutch correctional institutions has increased to nearly 30%. In contrast to many other countries, the use of double cells is a policy measure to cut costs, rather than a measure to deal with overcrowding of correctional institutions. This article examines individuals’ experiences of sharing a cell, and the association between cell sharing, wellbeing, misconduct, and prison climate, using survey data from the Life in Custody Study collected in 2019. The sample comprises 3408 participants (in regular prison regimes, pre-trial detention, and short-stay custody). The results show that most respondents report a good relationship with their cellmate, but still prefer a single cell. There is no evidence for positive effects of cell sharing on the researched domains; some negative effects are found when individuals prefer a single cell or report a poor relationship with their cellmate.

While research has increasingly focused on the role of digitalisation in prisoners’ detention experiences, the impact of the digitalisation of the prison regime on the discretionary power of prison officers has been understudied. By using an ethnographic approach in one digital Belgian prison, qualitative interview data are used to investigate the prison officer’s coping strategies in response to the digitalisation of prison life. It is found that the gatekeeping role of prison officer’s has been partly stripped away but also that the impact of digitalisation on the prison officer’s discretionary power depends on how digital technologies are implemented. Moreover, the study reveals that not all official goals regarding the digitalisation are met and highlights the need of supporting prison officers when implementing new technologies in prison.

This article takes issue with the tendency among political scientists and cultural critics to reduce the current rise of populism to resentment among certain groups in society. Instead, the article argues that particularly right-wing populist cultural criticism is derived from the Christian conceptual foundations of Western culture. Typical for these foundations has been the process of ‘diversification’ as defined by the American political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). As such, ‘diversification’ is diametrically opposed to the so-called ‘immanentization of the eschaton’ characteristic of modern Gnosticism. Populism is to be understood as a counter-movement to this Gnostic tendency in politics.

Life in prison goes hand in hand with far-reaching restrictions in the personal autonomy of offenders. Lack of personal autonomy and the coercion to perform certain actions disrupt the ‘normal’ intrinsic experiences of voluntary action (i.e. sense of agency). Disturbances in the neurocognitive basis of voluntary action have a number of clear effects on human functioning, including self-reliance. This paper provides a first analysis of the relationship between personal autonomy and the intrinsic experience of voluntary action, and how this may be the key to understanding how freedom restrictions in detention can reduce self-reliance.

In recent years, big data technology has revolutionised many domains, including policing. There is a lack of research, however, exploring which applications are used by the police, and the potential benefits of big data analytics for policing. Instead, literature about big data and policing predominantly focuses on predictive policing and its associated risks. The present paper provides new insights into the police’s current use of big data and algorithmic applications. We provide an up-to-date overview of the various applications of big data by the National Police in the Netherlands. We distinguish three areas: uniformed police work, criminal investigation, and intelligence. We then discuss two positive effects of big data and algorithmic applications for the police organization: accelerated learning and the formation of a single police organization.

Some of the existential threats we currently face are global in the sense that they affect us all, and thus matter of global concern and trigger duties of moral global solidarity. But some of these global threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are global in a second, additional, sense: discharging them requires joint, coordinated global action. For that reason, these twofold global threats trigger political – not merely moral – duties of global solidarity. This article explores the contrast between these two types of global threats with the purpose of clarifying the distinction between moral and political duties of global solidarity. And, in the absence of a fully developed global democratic institutional system, the article also explores some promising ways to fulfill our global political duties, especially those based on mechanisms of collective intelligence such as CrowdLaw, which might provide effective solutions to these global threats while enhancing the democratic legitimacy of public decision-making.

This contribution explores the meaning and scope of solidarity with the emergence of the coronavirus discourse as formulated by politicians in order to make sense of the virus. It offers a poststructuralist account drawing on discourse theory together with insights from Levinas and Derrida. This leads to a critical reflection on the prevailing view of solidarity as secondary and derivative to corona policies, because solidarity is often subjugated to hegemonic meanings of efficiency. Instead, the argument is made that solidarity refers to the unique responsibility to which the other as wholly other commands me. This appeal for responsibility, that is presented in the face of the other, is to be assumed in the distance between the rules and the singularity of the situation. Accordingly, solidarity is described as a paradox of dependence (calculability) and independence (beyond calculation), that appears in a moment of undecidability, for it can never be overcome.

The article discusses the tension between social solidarity and religious freedom as demonstrated by the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox sects in Israel to comply with COVID-19 regulations. The article provides a detailed description of the refusal to comply with the regulations restricting mass prayer services in synagogues and studying Torah in the yeshivas, thus interfering with the ultra-Orthodox religious life. The article suggests possible explanations for that refusal, based on either religious beliefs or a socio-political claim to autonomy, and discusses whether the polity should be willing to tolerate such a refusal on the basis of the cultural defence. The article concludes that despite the drastic restrictions on religious life caused by the social distancing regulations, and the special importance of freedom of religion, reducing the pandemic’s spread called for awarding priority to solidarity over religious freedom, and the enforcement of social solidarity legal duties – the social distancing regulations – on all.

What is at stake in invoking solidarity in legal-political contexts? The guiding hypothesis of this article is that solidarity is always and necessarily linked to the concept of community. A plea for solidarity will, in other words, directly lead one to the question: solidarity with whom? On the one hand, solidarity may be understood as extending only to those who belong to the same community as us. In this reading, solidarity builds upon an already existing community and applies to members only. On the other hand, invoked by those who aim to question the status quo, solidarity also plays a key role in practices of contestation. In these contexts, it focuses on collective action and the reimagination of political community. The article ends by articulating how this second interpretation of solidarity might prove helpful in making sense of our current predicament of a global pandemic.

Populism is a somehow intractable notion, since its reference is much too wide, comprising phenomena that are indeed in conflict between them, and moreover blurred, by being often used in an instrumental, polemical way. Such intractability is then radicalized through the two alternative approaches to populism, one that is more or less neutral, rooting in the political science tradition, and a second one, fully normative, though fed by political realism, founding as it does on a specific political theory and project. In the article an alternative view is proposed, that of populism as the politics that is congruent with the increasing role played by ‘screens’, icons, and images in social relationships and indeed in political representation. In this way populism is approached as the specific way politics is done within the context of a digitalized société du spectacle.

The article discusses a range of important normative questions raised by anti-COVID-19 measures and policies. Do governments have the right to impose such severe restrictions on individual freedom and furthermore do citizens have obligations vis-à-vis the state, others and themselves to accept such restrictions? I will argue that a democratic state may legitimately enforce publicly discussed, properly enacted and constitutionally tested laws and policies in order to protect its citizens from risks to life and limb. Even so, there is a natural limit, factual and normative, to what the state or a government can do in this respect. Citizens will also need to take it upon themselves not to harm and to protect others and in the context of a pandemic this means that endorsement of restrictions or other mandatory measures, notably vaccination, is not to be seen as a matter of personal preference concerning the supposedly inviolable sovereignty of one’s own body.

The COVID-19 crisis has produced or amplified disruptive processes in societies. This article wants to argue for the fact that we understand the meaning of the COVID-19 crisis only if we relate it to the fundamental vulnerability of modern life and the awareness of vulnerability of whole societies. Vulnerability in modernity are expressions of a reality of freedom that is to some extent considered contingent and therefore unsecured. It is true that law is understood today as the protective power of freedom. The thesis of the article, however, boils down to the fact that the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in a new way of thinking about the protection of freedom. This also means that the principle of solidarity must be assigned a new social role. Individual and societal vulnerability refer thereafter to an interconnectedness, dependency, and a future perspective of freedom margins that, in addition to the moral one, can also indicate a need for legal protection. In this respect, law has not only a function of delimitation, but also one of inclusion.

The Chilean government called upon ideas of social solidarity to fight the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 and it relied heavily on the criminal law in order to secure compliance with sanitary restrictions. However, because restrictions and prosecutorial policy did not take into account social background and people’s ability to comply with the law, prosecutions soon created groups of people who were being both over-exposed to disease and death, and over-exposed to control, blame and punishment. The configuration of this overpoliced and underprotected group became so visibly unjust that appealing to social solidarity to justify the criminal enforcement of sanitary restrictions became almost insulting. This forced the Fiscal Nacional to develop a ‘socially sensitive’ prosecutorial strategy, something that we have not often seen despite Chile’s inequalities. The changes in policy by the Fiscal Nacional suggest that perhaps, at times, penal institutions can be made accountable for acting in ways that create estrangement rather than cohesion.

This article starts with a brief exploration of the juridical and criminological meaning of money laundering. Subsequently, the author discusses two contributions that gained momentum in the Dutch debate on money laundering. This concerns, firstly, the statements of Roberto Saviano, an Italian journalist who claims that the Dutch tax regulations facilitate organized crime. Secondly, the author discusses Unger’s application of the so-called Walker model to estimate the size of money laundering in the Netherlands (and worldwide). Finally, he argues that, due to the limited, current level of empirical knowledge on criminal money flows, a question such as ‘How much money is laundered in the Netherlands?’, is in fact not suited as a research question.

Dit artikel geeft een overzicht van enkele recent uitgevoerde kwalitatieve en kwantitatieve empirische studies waarin het belang van ervaren procedurele rechtvaardigheid op een kritische manier wordt getoetst. Dit gebeurt onder meer door na te gaan of ervaren procedurele rechtvaardigheid ertoe doet bij politierechterzittingen, waarin voor verdachten veel op het spel kan staan. Daartoe zijn drie empirisch-juridische deelstudies uitgevoerd: (1) kwalitatieve interviews met 100 verdachten in politierechterzaken, (2) een vragenlijstonderzoek onder 198 verdachten in politierechterzaken en (3) een experiment onder 239 burgers die zich inleefden in de positie van de verdachte tijdens een politierechterzitting.
In dit artikel gaan we nader in op de achtergronden van deze studies, beschrijven we de manier waarop de studies zijn opgezet en uitgevoerd, en bespreken we de bevindingen op hoofdlijnen. Door de verschillende deelstudies met elk hun eigen methode in onderlinge samenhang te bespreken, en door te reflecteren op de vraag hoe de empirische onderzoeksbevindingen zich verhouden tot het normatieve domein van het recht, beoogt dit artikel een bijdrage te leveren aan de ontwikkeling en maatschappelijke impact van empirisch-juridisch onderzoek in zowel de Nederlandse strafrechtcontext als daarbuiten.