In deze bijdrage onderzoeken auteurs of in de Wmco wel voldoende rekening is gehouden met ontslag in en van de flexibele schil en zo nee, of aanpassing van de Wmco dan gewenst is met het oog op de doelstelling van de Wmco tegen de achtergrond van de huidige flexibele arbeidsmarkt. Daarnaast onderzoeken zij de rol van de overheid bij een collectief ontslag en meer specifiek over de NOW-1 en NOW-2 en de verhouding tot ondernemersvrijheden. De NOW-1 en -2 beperkten namelijk in zekere zin de vrijheid van ondernemingen om beslissingen te nemen over een collectief ontslag en de vraag is hoe die beperkingen ten aanzien van collectief ontslag zich verhouden tot de ondernemersvrijheden.

Verschillende internationale sportbonden voorzien in mogelijkheden voor geschilbeslechting voor hun leden. FIFA heeft in 2001 de FIFA Dispute Resolution Chamber (FIFA DRC) in het leven geroepen en voorziet haar leden via die instantie in de mogelijkheid voor interne geschilbeslechting. Er worden jaarlijks zo’n 2.000 zaken per jaar aan de FIFA DRC voorgelegd. Deze zaken betreffen arbeidsrechtelijke geschillen met een internationale dimensie, geschillen rondom het afgeven van een internationaal transfercertificaat of geschillen met betrekking tot te betalen opleidingsvergoedingen en solidariteitsbijdragen. In deze bijdrage gaat de auteur kort in op de organisatie van het nieuw opgerichte FIFA Football Tribunal en de belangrijkste procedurele aspecten onder de nieuwe reglementen.

The change of circumstances impacting the performance of the contracts has been a widely commented issue. However, there seems to be a gap in legal jurisprudence with regard to resorting to such a remedy in the investment contracts setting, especially from the procedural perspective. It has not been finally settled whether arbitral tribunals are empowered to adapt investment contracts should circumstances change and, if they were, what the grounds for such a remedy would be. In this article, the author presents the current debates regarding this issue, potential grounds for application of such a measure and several proposals which would facilitate resolution of this procedural uncertainty.

Legal professionals working in city and municipal government face changes in expectations about their roles within the organisation. Where in the past they mostly took on the reactive and detached role of guardians of legal quality, these days they are expected to take a more flexible, solution-oriented and cooperative stance. How do these legal professionals handle this shift? How far do they go in adapting and which factors play a role? Based on three different positions within the organisation I describe this process, focusing in particular on their perception of their professional roles, and their willingness to change. I conclude with some critical comments on the changing expectations from legal professionals.

This special issue focuses on the role concept, which has largely fallen out of use in sociology, but which seems ideally suited to analyze the circumstances in which legal professionals work nowadays. Their occupations are often surrounded by constitutional guarantees and professional standards, but at the same time in full swing due to policy reforms referred to as New Public Management and Socially Effective Judiciary (Maatschappelijk Effectieve Rechtspraak). This combination of relative role stability and rapid change can ensure that the predictability and desirability of the interpretation attributed to professional roles become subject of discussion and reflection. The way the role concept is used in this special issue is deliberately decoupled from the much-criticized structural functionalism with which it is often associated. The fact that this sociological perspective has lost much of its sway since the 1960s, because of its conservative character, makes it easier to give dynamics, ambiguity, conflict and resistance a prominent place in contemporary analyzes in which the role concept is central. The authors in this special issue examine whether the role fulfillment by professionals working in the legal field is actually subject of discussion and reflection and how this dynamic manifests itself.

By a majority of 4-3, the Supreme Court of Ireland has held that the Workplace Relations Commission’s power to adjudicate disputes between employers and employees was not unconstitutional. However, the majority of the Supreme Court did find that certain aspects of the Commission’s procedures were unconstitutional, namely the blanket ban on public hearings and the lack of capacity for taking evidence on oath. The Workplace Relations Act 2015 and the Workplace Relations Commission procedures have consequently been amended to address these issues. This case report is a follow-up on EELC 2020/34.

In the Netherlands, domestic violence cases are often heard in criminal court by a single judge. In these cases usually the family is usually confronted with multiple problems related to divorce or separation, child protection issues, financial problems, psychological problems or addiction and aggression problems that can lead to various legal proceedings with different judges. The District Court of Rotterdam has started a pilot ‘integrated approach to domestic violence’. In this paper results of the pilot evaluation are presented in relation to recent developments of the judiciary to focus on effective problem solving courts.

This article is an analysis of about 350 decisions of Dutch criminal courts since mediation was introduced as an instrument in criminal law (art. 51h of the Dutch criminal code). It appears that mediation not only benefits the offender in terms of reduction of punishment, but also has significant effects on other aspects of the domain of criminal justice. For example on complaints about the decision of the Public Prosecutor not to prosecute a suspect, the eligibility of the Public Prosecutor in a criminal procedure, claims for compensation of the victim, compensation for damage of the offender being in preventive custody, and costs of the offender for a lawyer to defend him in a criminal procedure. Although much progress can be made in applying mediation in criminal procedures, it is concluded that mediation is now an important form of restorative justice in the Dutch criminal justice system.

Restorative justice as implemented in many countries adopts a rather narrow approach, where responding to crime and other types of injustice is being restricted to the interpersonal level. ‘Society’ as important pillar in ­restorative justice does not play an ­important role in daily practice, and ­linkages to the institutional and political ­level are seldom established. Such practice risks to replicate or to strengthen structural inequalities in society. One possible strategy to deal with this challenge, is to engage in network oriented ­approaches in order to develop a better understanding of system injustices, and to contribute to more encom­passing and sustainable response mechanisms in society. Can and should the restorative justice movement build alliances with other social movements in order to realise this perspective? The article is structured along the following lines. First, various visions of ‘structural violence’ are reflected upon. Reference is made, for example, to the issue of ­(de)colonisation and concomitant forms of ‘epistemic injustice’. Considerable attention is given to the complexity and the multilayered nature of underlying causes of injus­tices in the respective social fields, and to the risk of simplification and polarisation in society but also within social movements. The discussion then fo­cuses on practices of dealing with conflict, diversity and participatory decision making within the respective social movements, and whether and how restorative justice can offer inspiration and practical support. Thirdly, broader strategies on social transformation are discussed, dealing with, for example, how the interchangeable roles of warrior and healer can be adopted, and how, at a more general level, restorative oriented partnerships can be formed.

The COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020 impelling us to reconsider the basic principles of constitutional law like the separation of power, the rule of law, human rights protection, etc. The two most pressing legal issues that have attracted the attention of legal scholars so far are, on the one hand, the different regulatory policies implemented by governments and, on the other, the balance among the branches of government in deciding matters of the emergency. The pandemic has determined a further and violent acceleration of the legislature’s temporal dimension and the acknowledgement that, to make legislation quicker, parliament must permanently displace its legislative power in favour of government. Measures adopted to tackle the outbreak and recover from the interruption of economic and industrial businesses powerfully confirm that today our societies are more dependent on the executives than on parliaments and, from a temporal perspective, that the language of the law is substantially the present instead of the future. Against this background, this article discusses how the prevalence of governments’ legislative power leads to the use of temporary and experimental legislation in a time, like the pandemic, when the issue of ‘surviving’ becomes dominant.

This article examines how Spanish and Catalan laws deal with claims of grandparents who seek contact with their grandchildren against the will of one or both parents, and the scope given to their rights. It starts by explaining the content and the goals of the legal reforms enacted in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century to promote grandparents’ interests. Then, it presents the case law developed in the interpretation of the relevant legal rules. The resulting state of the law is assessed, taking into account the interests of all the parties involved (parents, grandparents, and grandchildren). The experience of more than twenty years of application of the specific provisions concerning grandparents’ contact rights sheds light on the impact of giving grandparents stronger legal rights. However, it also prompts the question of whether this legislative choice might have brought about useless and potentially harmful litigation.

Mediation is becoming ever more important in French law. For a long time, parties have been able to agree to mediate to avoid expensive and long legal proceedings. Recent reforms have extended the scope of mediation. The courts can ask parties to try and mediate, and in some areas of law, for instance disputes about less than € 5000, mediation has even become a prerequisite for being able to file a case. Whilst mediation is thus playing an important role in everyday disputes, national regulation for mediators is lagging behind. There are no thorough universal standards for mediators and there is no central disciplinary board, even though mediators’ organizations have been creating such professional rules and institutions. It is likely the advent of a mandatory attempt at mediation will lead the French legislator to adopt more universal rules for mediation.