Kwaliteit van wetgeving is cruciaal voor het vertrouwen van burgers in de overheid en daarmee voor het draagvlak van die overheid. Toch is dit te vaak een onderbelicht element in het wetgevingsproces. Dit geldt zeker tijdens een kabinetsformatie en het opstellen van een regeerakkoord. Maar ook gedurende een kabinetsperiode krijgt de kwaliteit van wetgeving niet altijd de aandacht die nodig is. Dit artikel gaat in op de wijze waarop in een regeerakkoord beter rekening kan worden gehouden met die kwaliteit. Ook tijdens het reguliere beleidsproces zijn er verschillende instrumenten en mogelijkheden om tijdig de kwaliteit van wetgeving als onderdeel van het wetgevingsproces te borgen. Daarbij wordt uitgebreider stilgestaan bij een uniek wetgevingsproces in de jaren negentig.

In oktober 2021 is door de Welshe regering de zogeheten Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales geïnstalleerd. Waartoe is deze Commissie in het leven geroepen?

This article deals with the legislative proposal in the Netherlands to criminalise staying (without permission) in an area controlled by a terrorist organisation. The discussion surrounding the proposal is focused, amongst other things, on possible exemptions for journalists and providers of humanitarian assistance. This article analyses the newest version of the proposal in light of the rights to freedom of movement and freedom of expression.

Recente jurisprudentie wijst uit dat – naast de inbreukprocedure – de prejudiciële procedure een bijdrage kan leveren aan de instandhouding van de rechtsstaat. Vooral de eis van rechterlijke onafhankelijkheid heeft een nadere invulling gekregen in een serie prejudiciële uitspraken, over bijvoorbeeld de benoeming van rechters en tuchtrechtelijke sancties, met name in Polen. Bij zijn analyse betrekt het Hof van Justitie nadrukkelijk de ruimere context. Het voert daarbij een ‘ketenanalyse’ uit: politieke invloed op het orgaan dat rechters selecteert, tast ook de positie van de aldus benoemde rechters aan. Wat is de rechtsbasis voor deze jurisprudentie, en waar liggen de grenzen?

In this article we introduce the main principles of the Polish dismissal protection regulation. Issues addressed include the underlying principles for the system of dismissal protection, notice periods, justifiable reasons for dismissal, consultation of trade unions and how to remedy unfair or defective dismissals. We also very briefly touch upon dismissal protection of civil servants.

Originally, Article 12 of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure was intended as a correction mechanism for the prosecution monopoly of the Public Prosecution Service. In a later stage, the private interest of complainants (or victims) became more central. This article argues that a third function now emerges: a valve function for social dissatisfaction. The social conflicts that underly the proceedings in these socially sensitive cases give rise to new democratic legitimacy problems. However, an appropriate normative framework that captures these new democratic demands has not yet been constructed. To this end, this article provides an alternative democratic vocabulary in order to bridge the gap between empirical and normative notions of legitimacy. By means of a historical and normative analysis, it will be argued that Article 12 has an important democratic potential within the characteristically autonomous Dutch system of criminal law.

Various of our academic board analysed employment law cases from last year.

The subject of this article is constitutional transformations in Sub-Saharan Africa upon and after the region’s encounter with the third wave of democratization in Africa (TWD) that took place between 1989 and 1994. Since failure in democratic rule in the region was associated with the ease with which political elites amended formal constitutions to subvert democracy, anti-authoritarian factions perceived the solution to the problems bedevilling democratic governance in Africa to lie in formal constitutional rewriting. Hence, virtually all countries ventured into constitutional change – amendment or substitution – in the early 1990s. Inasmuch as different countries changed different formal aspects of their constitutions, they largely recognized multiparty democracy and obliterated the hitherto formulations that either allowed or endorsed single-party political regimes. Yet, on the ground different transitional outcomes were achieved, with a majority of countries either failing to transform at all from de facto authoritarianism or simply making partial transitions into semi-authoritarian or rather hybrid regimes. Using Cameroon, Kenya and Benin, this article contends that disestablishment of authoritarian rule depends on certain enabling factors, which seem to go beyond textual formulation and which may account for both the present conditions of these countries and the different transitional outcomes that were realized after these countries changed their formal constitutions in the early 1990s.

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.

Between 1964 and 1976, roughly the heydays of dechurching in the Netherlands, the Dutch government contributed to the construction of 788 church buildings and one mosque through the Church Building Premium Act. After 1976, however, there was no longer any political basis for similar support of religious newcomers – apart from a few temporary subsidies to specific Muslim communities. In this article I argue that to understand developments in Dutch church-state relations it is not enough to study cultural-ideological shifts as visible in in media-outlets and parliamentary deliberations. The case of direct funding for houses of worship illustrates that dynamics of church and state relations can only fully assessed by delving into the politico-institutional context in which policy deliberations took place. This shows that political decisions about policies on religious accommodation were highly influenced by the way the trajectory of decision making was organized. Both the amount of access of faith-based organisations to the negotiation tables and the extent to which policy-debates were linked to or decoupled from concurrent policy issues mattered greatly for the outcome of policy deliberations.

Deze bijdrage bespreekt de ordenende functie van rechtsbelangen. Deze functie heeft een interne en een externe zijde, zodat misschien zelfs van ordenende functies gesproken kan worden. Rechtsbelangen helpen bij het ordenen van strafbaarstellingen tot een bepaalde systematiek. Om die reden wordt ook van een groeperingsfunctie gesproken. Zij helpen ook het strafrecht af te bakenen van andere rechtsgebieden, zoals het bestuurs- of civiele recht. De bijdrage gaat in op de vraag of deze functie wel helemaal tot wasdom komt en of van rechtsbelangen kan worden gevraagd dat zij het strafrecht helpen ordenen.

In zijn oratie gaat Kemp in op de spanning die binnen de vennootschap bestaat tussen de vennootschapsleiding die het belang van de vennootschap moet behartigen en de aandeelhouders die – volgens de heersende leer – hun eigen belang mogen behartigen. Mede op grond van rechtseconomische gedachten doet hij een aanzet tot hoe de bevoegdheidsverdeling binnen de vennootschap verder kan worden vormgegeven.

Many doctrinal legal research questions require making use of other academic disciplines or perspectives. This article explains the relevance of legal philosophy for doctrinal research projects. Often legal research questions have conceptual or evaluative dimensions that presuppose philosophical understanding. For research on the concept of democracy, the function of constitutional rights, or the possible introduction of a referendum in the Netherlands, questions of a philosophical nature need to be answered. Legal philosophy can supplement and enrich doctrinal research in various ways. In this article, we present seven purposes that legal philosophy may serve in the context of a doctrinal research project: conceptual clarification, exposition and reconstruction of fundamental normative principles and values, theory building, providing creative perspectives, structural critiques, evaluation, and recommendations. For each objective, we illustrate how to use relevant philosophical methods. Thus, this article complements our earlier publication ‘Legal Philosophy as an Enrichment of Doctrinal Research – Part I: Introducing Three Philosophical Methods’.¹x http://www.lawandmethod.nl/tijdschrift/lawandmethod/2020/01/lawandmethod-D-19-00006.

Noten

• * This text has been presented to classes at the University of Zagreb, Queen Mary University of London and Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam; we profited from the feedback of our students. We also want to thank Irma Bluijs, Machteld Geuskens, Tamar de Waal and the reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article, and Jacqueline Brand and Robert Poll for providing research assistance.

• 1 http://www.lawandmethod.nl/tijdschrift/lawandmethod/2020/01/lawandmethod-D-19-00006.

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.

In 2020, the Belgian federal Government announced that it will recognize Buddhism as a non-confessional worldview. This recognition will give the Buddhists several privileges: the salaries and pensions of lama’s as well as of Buddhist consultants in prisons, hospitals and the army will be paid for by the state. In addition, state schools will be required to organize Buddhist education at parental request. From the perspective of equal treatment and within the current constitutional framework, the recognition of Buddhism can only be welcomed. But is this constitutional framework, which is amongst others indebted to the concordat between Napoleon and the Holy See (1801), still up to date? In 1983, the Dutch Government abolished this Napoleonic model of state financing and opted for a profound reform of the system. In this article, I will show why such a reform could also be useful and inspiring in the Belgian context.