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.

The availability and use of big data sources is increasing exponentially. The variety of new and emerging data sources offers opportunities to complement, replace, improve or add to conventional data sources. Survey data are one kind of conventional data sources. In survey research, a framework to assess the accuracy of survey data already existed for quite some time. This framework is known as the Total Survey Error (TSE) framework. The philosophy behind this framework has only recently been universalized to (big) data in general in the form of the Total Error (TE) framework. This generic framework, which allows for assessing the accuracy of (big) data, is outlined in this article. Additionally, the TE framework is applied to big data sources that could be relevant for policing: police-registered crime data, Twitter data and mobile phone data.

This special issue reflects about big data applications in policing. Terpstra and Salet (2020) refer to this development as ‘one of the greatest changes within the police about the past decade’ (p. 25). Beside attention to this topic in Dutch literature (e.g. Janssen et al., 2020; Spithoven & Beerends, 2019), the relevance of the subject is also internationally recognized (e.g. Brayne, 2021; Ferguson, 2017; Ridgeway, 2018). In this special issue, we examine – with a view to the past, present and future – how big data could be used in policing in the Netherlands and Belgium. This special issue is not about empirical big data applications, for that we would like to refer to specific studies (e.g., Rummens et al., 2021); in this issue we especially want to outline the breadth of this research area.

Hate crime victims involved in a criminal procedure experience difficulties that are different from problems encountered by other victims. In trying to meet the specific procedural needs of hate crime victims many EU Member States have introduced protective measures and services in criminal proceedings, but the adopted approaches are widely disparate. By reporting the results of an EU-wide comparative survey into hate crime victims within national criminal procedures the authors aim to: (1) make an inventory of the national (legal) definitions of hate crime and the protection measures available (on paper) for hate crime victims; and (2) critically discuss certain national choices, inter alia by juxtaposing the procedural measures to the procedural needs of hate crime victims to see if there are any lacunae from a victimological perspective. The authors conclude that the Member States should consider expanding their current corpus of protection measures in order to address some of the victims’ most urgent needs.

Naming-and-shaming campaigns, in which civil society groups publicly call upon corporations to end harmful behavior via social media, are a powerful mechanism for social control of corporations. This article investigates naming and shaming in modern, global markets through a case study of Shell - one of the most stigmatized corporations of our time. First, the perspective of organizational sociology is used to answer the question why Shell is receiving such significant attention. Next, the article addresses how shaming manifests itself in global markets. The example of Shell illustrates reintegrative shaming, aiming to end harmful activities, as well as stigmatizing shaming that undermines a corporation’s license to operate.
Finally, this article discusses the potential consequences of naming and shaming for corporate reputations. In the case of Shell, Goffman’s concept of courtesy stigma appears to form the greatest reputational risk, as stigmatization of Shells business partners will create status anxiety and will limit opportunities to develop business.

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 this article we study a case of responsive law, i.e. the Dutch Social Support Act, which entails the open norm to provide tailored support as the antithesis of universal ‘one-size-fits-all-solutions’. Rather than assessing clients’ needs based on check lists, street-level bureaucrats are expected to jointly explore fitting solutions in dialogue with citizens during a so-called kitchen table talk. The space to tailor support to the individual situation, however, creates ambiguity about the interpretation of this open norm and conflicting expectations with regard to stakeholders’ roles. This role-ambiguity is not only situated in the interaction between professional and citizen at the kitchen table, but is nested in a multi-actor network of policy makers, frontline workers, clients of social support, lawyers and judges. In this article we zoom in on this network to investigate how multiple stakeholders cope with ambiguity regarding the interpretation of the open norm and each other’s roles. The conducted qualitative study (observations, interviews and document analysis) provides revealing insights into the strategies employed by multiple actors when role-ambiguity emerges, including strategies of standardization, proto professionalization and objectification. These strategies cannot be seen in isolation from one another and their interaction results in the unintended effect of more rules and administrative burden and less discretionary space for tailored support. Based on these findings we argue that mutual trust and insights into the various roles within this network is of great importance in order to prevent rule-reflex. In addition, professionals should be better equipped to conduct open dialogues about what constitutes appropriate support with the client. Finally, sufficient financial leeway is needed for municipalities so that they are not forced to constantly seek the legal boundaries of what can be regarded as the minimum variant of social support.

In this article, we analyse Regulation (EU) 2020/1043 on Covid-19 against the backdrop of the current deadlock in EU-regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We build on temporary and experimental legislation scholarship and employ a normative framework of regulatory knowledge. The Covid-19 Regulation aims at speeding up the development of GMO-based Covid-19 treatments or vaccines by temporarily suspending requirements that otherwise would have made for time-consuming and burdensome authorization processes. Although the Regulation lacks an explicit experimental purpose, we hypothesize that experiences with its functioning may be utilized in evaluation processes serving attempts to change the GMO legal framework. As such, it may fulfil a latent experimental function. We reflect on the types of knowledge that are relevant when evaluating experimental legislation and developing regulation more generally and argue that the inclusion of social knowledge is pertinent in dealing with complex issues such as GMO regulation. Experimental law literature focuses on gathering evidence-based knowledge about the functioning of legislation but virtually neglects knowledge about different experiences and value appreciations of various societal actors and social-contextual mechanisms. We propose that such social knowledge be included in the design of experimental legislation and that evaluation be approached bottom-up instead of top-down.

Thought experiments have been widely used in virtually all sciences and humanities. Law is no exception. We can find countless instances of such experiments in both the legal practice and the legal theory. However, this method has hardly been studied by legal scholars, which contrasts with the vast literature devoted to it in other fields of knowledge. This article analyses the role that some thought experiments – those where an imaginary legal change is made, and its social effects are observed – may play in law. In particular, we show why these empirical legal thought experiments might be useful for the practice and theory of law, the main principles for conducting them and how the law deals with them.

The media are a main source of information on crime for citizens. Prior research shows that media and fear of crime are not independent of each other. Since fake news is spread through (social) media, the question arises what the relationship is between (perceived) fake news and fear of crime. To date, no large-scale representative research has been conducted on this topic. This study is based on a representative population survey (n = 1566) from 2019. This exploratory study shows a small but significant relation between the perceived prevalence of fake news and fear of crime.

Sinds inwerkingtreding van de WAMCA kent de collectieve actie een procedurele tweedeling in een ontvankelijkheidsfase en een inhoudelijke fase. Inhoudelijke behandeling van de vordering vindt ingevolge art. 1018c lid 5 Rv pas plaats indien en nadat de rechter over de ontvankelijkheid heeft beslist. De vraag is in hoeverre de twee fasen los van elkaar kunnen worden gezien, nu elementen van de ontvankelijkheidstoets nauw zijn verweven met de inhoudelijke beoordeling. De auteur maakt een vergelijking met de Amerikaanse federale class action, die een soortgelijke problematiek kent, en betoogt dat een genuanceerde toepassing van art. 1018c lid 5 Rv aangewezen is.

A forensic mental health report is requested in about 30% of more serious cases presented to the criminal court. These reports can be used at sentencing and advise the judge on criminal responsibility, recidivism risk, and possible treatment measures, but is not a formal factor in decisions about guilt. The current study focuses on the (unwarranted) effect of forensic mental health information on conviction decisions. Using an experimental vignette study among 155 criminology students, results show that when a mental disorder is present, conviction rates are higher than when such information is absent. In line with the story model of judicial decision-making, additional analyses showed that this effect was mediated by the evaluation of guilt rather than by the evaluation of other physical evidence. Implications for further research and practice are discussed.

The article presents the status quo of the law of retrial in Germany and gives an overview of the law and practice of the latter in favour of the convicted and to the disadvantage of the defendant. Particularly, the formal and material prerequisites for a successful petition to retry the criminal case are subject to a detailed presentation and evaluation. Because no official statistics are kept regarding successful retrial processes in Germany, the actual number of judicial errors is primarily the subject of more or less well-founded estimates by legal practitioners and journalists. However, there are a few newer empirical studies devoted to different facets of the subject. These studies will be discussed in this article in order to outline the state of empirical research on the legal reality of the retrial procedure. Against this background, the article will ultimately highlight currently discussed reforms and subject these to a critical evaluation as well. The aim of the recent reform efforts is to add a ground for retrial to the disadvantage of the defendant for cases in which new facts or evidence indicate that the acquitted person was guilty. After detailed discussion, the proposal in question is rejected, inter alia for constitutional reasons.

Wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice, their reasons and effects, only rarely become the subject of academic debate in Poland. This article aims at filling this gap and providing a discussion on the current challenges of mechanisms available in Polish law focused on the verification of final judgments based on innocence claims. While there are two procedures designed to move such judgment: cassation and the reopening of criminal proceedings, only the latter aims at the verification of new facts and evidence, and this work remains focused exactly on that issue. The article begins with a case study of the famous Komenda case, which resulted in a successful innocence claim, serving as a good, though rare, example of reopening a case and acquitting the convict immediately and allows for discussing the reasons that commonly stand behind wrongful convictions in Poland. Furthermore, the article examines the innocence claim grounds as regulated in the Polish criminal procedure and their interpretation under the current case law. It also presents the procedure concerning the revision of the case. The work additionally provides the analysis of the use of innocence claim in practice, feeding on the statistical data and explaining tendencies in application for revision of a case. It also presents the efforts of the Polish Ombudsman and NGOs to raise public awareness in that field. The final conclusions address the main challenges that the Polish system faces concerning innocence claims and indicates the direction in which the system should go.

Since 1997, the Criminal Cases Review Commission of England, Wales and Northern Ireland has served as a state-funded post-conviction body to consider claims of wrongful conviction for those who have exhausted their rights to appeal. A meticulous organisation that has over its lifetime referred over 700 cases back to the Court of Appeal, resulting in over 60% of those applicants having their convictions quashed, it is nonetheless restricted in its response to cases by its own legislation. This shapes its decision-making in reviewing cases, causing it to be somewhat deferential to the original jury, to the principle of finality and, most importantly, to the Court of Appeal, the only institution that can overturn a wrongful conviction. In mandating such deference, the legislation causes the Commission to have one eye on the Court’s evolving jurisprudence but leaves room for institutional and individual discretion, evidenced in some variability in responses across the Commission. While considerable variability would be difficult to defend, some inconsistency raises the prospects for a shift towards a less deferential referral culture. This article draws on original research by the author to consider the impact of institutional deference on the work of the Criminal Cases Review Commission and argues for a slightly bolder approach in its work

The Italian Constitution expressly contemplates the possibility of a wrongful conviction, by stating that the law shall determine the conditions and forms regulating damages in case of judicial error. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many provisions of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure (CCP) deal with the topic. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the post-conviction remedies in the Italian legal system by considering the current provisions of the CCP, on the one hand, and by exploring their practical implementation, on the other.

According to the traditional view, the ultimate aim of the extraordinary review (recurso de revisión) provided in the Spanish justice system was to deal with wrongful criminal convictions and correct those serious miscarriages of justice which became apparent only after the judgment had become final. However, the 2015 reform called this traditional view into question by formally including two additional grounds for review that are not necessarily related to the correcting miscarriages or blatant mistakes in the assessment of the facts made by the sentencing court. This paper aims to give an overview of the extraordinary review in Spain. To that end it will first address the legal framework and its practical implementation, as well as present pitfalls and best practices. Finally, future trends and challenges will be identified in order to improve the protection of defendants who have suffered a wrongful conviction.

Een scherpe stijging in het aantal drones en snelle vorderingen in dronetechnologie creëren nieuwe mogelijkheden en risico’s voor veiligheid en privacy. Door een beperkte toezichtcapaciteit is er behoefte aan gedragsinterventies die spontane naleving stimuleren. Het huidige onderzoek beschrijft psychologische factoren, zoals weerstand, die het regelnalevingsgedrag van dronepiloten beïnvloeden omtrent vliegen in no fly zones (gebieden waar men niet met een drone mag vliegen). De gemodelleerde antwoorden van 843 dronepiloten laten zien dat twee typen weerstand, inertie en scepticisme, invloed hebben op het gedrag van dronepiloten. Dit artikel beschrijft hoe deze inzichten door toezichthouders kunnen worden gebruikt om gewenst gedrag te bevorderen.

A recent challenge to the constitutionality of the Irish Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has failed. The applicant in the case at hand argued that the WRC was unconstitutional for two reasons: (a) that the WRC carries out the administration of justice in breach of the general constitutional rule that only the courts may administer justice; and (b) several of the statutory procedures of the WRC were so deficient that they failed to vindicate the applicant’s personal constitutional rights. The High Court of Ireland dismissed both arguments.