The trade in caviar has a rich and colorful history, influenced over thousands of years by many cultures, societies and in the last decades by regulation. Based on qualitative research, including literature, media analysis and interviews, this article presents the first preliminary results of the authors’ ongoing research. The value of caviar is historically discovered in the context of social change, political relationships and environmental change and the role of organized crime is described, as the scarcity of caviar has offered the unique opportunity to fish illegally, smuggle and trade contraband to mainly European countries with millions in profits. Although due to overexploitation ‘wild caviar’ is increasingly difficult to obtain, the demand in the context of exclusivity and scarcity remains intact by the upper class society desire for edible gold.

Drawing on the findings of a recent empirical study conducted across four jurisdictions, this article considers the ways in which legal assistance is provided to suspects who are held in police custody for formal questioning. It sets out, very briefly, the legal framework developed by the European Court of Human Rights and now the EU, and the legal provisions in place in the four jurisdictions post Salduz. It then goes on to consider the kinds of factors that, in practice, promote or constrain the provision of effective legal assistance. These include the occupational cultures of police and lawyers and the availability of human and financial resources. Whilst the criminal processes of the four jurisdictions are different, there are many similarities in the working practices of police and lawyers and a lack of agreement among police and lawyers, as to the value of legal assistance to suspects before and during police interrogation.

What do citizens do when they think they have a problem that involves the law? Just like 40 years ago the main bottleneck in such a situation is where to find good advice on which steps to take. However, the difference compared to 40 years ago is the existence of more and a greater variety of organisations offering legal advice. This article describes the evolution of legal aid in the Netherlands, supplemented by comments of two people who have been personally involved in this development, Peter van den Biggelaar and Maurits Barendrecht. Mr Van den Biggelaar is director of the Dutch Board for Legal Aid, while Mr Barendrecht is research director of Hiil Innovating Justice and law professor at the University of Tilburg.

As a core element of the ‘rechtsstaat’ (a country under the rule of law) the importance of the principle of access to justice is widely agreed upon. Nevertheless it is complicated to reach an agreement on subjects that are pivotal to the implementation of this principle in practice. The needs of society change over time and the factors that influence the concrete accessibility are many (costs, length, complexity of procedures, etc.). Furthermore, as a result of the coming into being of ADR and new forms of law enforcement the use of the civil and criminal trial has declined. To evaluate the current state of access to justice against the backdrop of these factors and developments the central question should be whether the judge is still able to fulfil his function in a rechtsstaat of providing legal protection, whilst functioning as a counterbalance to the executive and law-making powers of the state.

Both in public policy and in scientific research, the concept of access to justice has been subject to change. In the seventies access to justice was mainly understood as access to a lawyer and a judge. In the nineties the perspective widens to alternative forms of dispute resolution, self-help and juridification of problems. The present article focuses on access to justice for citizens who experienced civil and administrative problems. Firstly, it illustrates the change in public policy with respect to dispute resolution. Secondly, it describes the shifting views on access to justice in empirical research. Furthermore it presents the results of socio-legal research into the dispute resolution of citizens and discusses what these results tell us about access to justice.

Current trends in the delivery of legal services create the opportunity to develop a new generation of access to justice platforms. On the basis of two examples, the author illustrates how this can work. M-Sheria is a technology-based access to justice service that serves the poor in Kenya. It combines state of the art information technology (USSD, SMS, internet) and human technology (community paralegals and pro bono advocates) to help slum dwellers solve their legal problems. Rechtwijzer 2.0 is an internet-based platform that provides online human and technology-facilitated support to people with a legal problem in the Netherlands. These examples show how processes and professionals can be innovated to facilitate dispute resolution in delivering information and interventions just in time.

Since the mid-1980s American recipes for the fight against crime and nuisance are very popular amongst Dutch policymakers. The question posed in this article is why they rather look at the United States than at European countries far more comparable to the Netherlands. The authors answers this question by pointing at the popularity of neo-liberal recipes in general, an emotional historical bond marked by the time that New York was still called New Amsterdam and the liberation from Nazism in 1945, the (sometimes reluctant) acceptance of the US’ role as ‘the world’s policeman’ and a (mostly unspoken) belief that ‘bigger is better’. Next, the author draws some lessons from research on ‘how policy travels’: 1) crime policies are always in much wider social policies and idea(l)s; 2) if something ‘works’ in country A it doesn’t mean it also ‘works’ in country B; 3) policies are always adopted to national circumstances; 4) policymakers are particularly fond of simple messages and dislike nuances and criticism; 5) you can also look at the US in order to find out where ‘we’ don’t want to go; and 6) you most of all learn more about yourself if you look at other countries. The author concludes with a plea for critical cosmopolitanism and a decolonisation of criminology from national biases.

This article introduces and evaluates three different specialty court programs that are being enacted in a large Texas county to locally fight the growing tide of unsustainably high incarceration rates that is sweeping the United States. The study provides a brief description of the general dilemma of the American criminal justice system that, as a result of the widespread fear of crime and a mainstream news arena that favors grossly simplistic sound-byte-compatible get-tough policies, has become so immensely punitive and overburdening on public budgets that it is de facto no longer sustainable and in desperate need of immediate change. Faced with a situation of political stalemate on state and federal levels, county judges in Texas and other states are taking it upon themselves to bring about change in their local jurisdictions. Through newly designed specialty courts models, they seek to divert special-needs offenders away from the default incarceration track. The article evaluates the overall effectiveness of these new sentencing alternatives and identifies specific areas that need further improvement.

This article focuses on the question whether Dutch policy makers and researchers ought to look more often to Scandinavia for inspiration and less to the West (UK and USA). Scandinavian countries are also influenced by Anglo-American ideas about crime and justice, but at the same time the number of incarcerated persons has not changed dramatically while recidivism rates are low. Dutch policy makers and researcher do sometimes look at initiatives and practices in Scandinavian countries, most often Sweden. Dutch society shares many similarities with the Scandinavian welfare states and therefore it should be natural – according to the author – to benefit more often from Scandinavian experiences. Some suggestions are discussed in the article.

The draft of the Dutch Whistleblower Protection Act that is currently discussed in Parliament can be regarded as an essential step forward in the protection of whistleblowers. However, it can be questioned if the Act will contribute in an optimal manner to the ideal of transparency and the fight against the abuse of power, which should be the main goal of the Act. The tasks and powers of the new House for Whistleblowers are rather unclear and they do not meet legal standards. The combination of advice and support to whistleblowers and independent research into major violations of integrity should be abolished.

National governments have adopted a variety of approaches to the protection of whistleblowers. This article refers to examples in Slovenia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, and ongoing work in Ireland, the Netherlands and Serbia. It is not always clear what would count as success, but none of the existing laws appears to have wholly achieved its aims. The Council of Europe aims to establish some common ground in Europe by drafting a Recommendation which will establish principles on which Member States should draft laws and establish systems. This article considers the work done so far on the draft Recommendation, discusses some of the most important and problematic aspects, and suggests improvements.

This article focusses on the share of Roma in the labour migration from Eastern and Central Europe to the Netherlands. By combining European reports on the situation of what is Europe’s largest minority group with insights from Dutch migration studies push and pull factors are identified as well as the mobility patterns of Roma involved in the process of migration. Attention is also paid to the ‘when and how’ of the Dutch response (‘agenda setting’) – at home and in the European context – to the growing importance of the Roma issue in Europe. As an example the position of Bulgarian Roma in larger cities like Rotterdam is explored further.

This article describes the migration history of the Netherlands after World War II. The emphasis is on labour migration as the article seeks to clarify that the inflow of foreign labour had a large impact on the magnitude and the course of migration flows towards and from the Netherlands. This is quite obvious for the period in which labour migration was the most important immigration type. However, this article also deals with the influence of labour migration of earlier periods on other migration types, which became the most important immigration types from the first oil crisis of 1973. Next to the immigration history, the inflow of foreign labourers also affected the emigration history of the Netherlands to a certain extent.

This article describes the social position of Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrants in the Netherlands, in particular their labour and housing position, using the results of recent Dutch research by three different groups of scholars. We cannot speak of a homogeneous group of migrants. The prevailing image of the hard-working labour migrant, doing low-qualified and often low-paid work (even though many of them are highly skilled) and faced with poor working and living conditions is largely confirmed by the available research. However, there are also knowledge workers (‘kennismigranten’) among the migrants from CEE-countries working in the Netherlands. In addition, the authors also found partners and children of previous migrants from CEE-countries, and students. This diversity of the new group of migrants from CEE-countries forms a challenge for local governments to find appropriate instruments to lead integration on the right track.

Since 1995 the influx of labour migrants in the Netherlands has increased steadily from over 10.000 in 1995 to around 47.000 in 2011. As a consequence, from 2007, searching a job is the main migration motive of non-Dutch immigrants to migrate to the Netherlands. On average, one third of all labour migrants were women. Explanations for the fact that a minority of the labour migrants coming to the Netherlands are women can be derived from the literature. Possible reasons are gender patterns (in the Netherlands and/or the countries of origin) and differences in the personal networks of men and women. In addition, the Dutch labour migration policy, and in particular the conditions applying to labour migrants (in terms of education and employment sector) as well as the restriction on the right of family members of labour migrants to work in the Netherlands, may limit the influx of female labour migrants.

While reflecting on gender issues transgender persons and their issues are often neglected. Government institutions on various levels don’t know how to handle their gender nonconformity as neither male nor female. Also they are often targets of inappropriate police and judicial measures. Transgender persons are often sceptical and cautious when interacting with those professionals: a fair and respectful treatment is not to be expected. In this article the author takes on to explore this blind spot. She presents the results of a survey on the transgender discrimination and violence by police and judicial institutions in Germany. The author points out that this is a result of the ongoing structural discrimination of gender non-conform persons in a binary gender system. This topic is part of her PhD thesis on the experience of discrimination and violence of gender non-conform persons in general. Her qualitative study is based on narrative interviews and a group discussion with gender non-conform persons in Germany.

This article sheds light on an aspect of honour-based violence (HBV) that is rarely addressed: male victimisation. HBV is usually regarded as violence inflicted on women by men. Police cases of male victimisation of HBV and scarce literature on this subject illustrate the ways in which men can become victims of violence. Men can be victimised in the same way that women are, for example when they commit adultery, are openly homosexual, or through conflicts about the choice of a partner. A specific and contested form of male victimisation occurs when their families pressure them to commit violence in order to restore family honour. Men are less likely than women to claim victim status and their victimisation of HBV is therefore possibly underreported. The authors do not argue to neglect female victims, but to expand hegemonic images of HBV and gender roles to include male victimisation. More insight into these matters is necessary to ensure the right support for each victim of HBV and to enable men and women to resolve these conflicts together.

There are not only biological differences between men and women; there are also differences in social roles for men and women. In the 1970s the term ‘gender’ was introduced in order to make a distinction between the biological sex and the social roles ascribed to the sexes. But what does that term gender actually mean and what does it add to our understanding of social life in general and especially within the field of law enforcement? In the first part of the article a brief historical overview of the introduction of and debate on the gender concept is presented. The second part zooms in on the actual use of gender in (criminological) research on law enforcement.

Having a job is an all day reality, having a job in a prison or a forensic psychiatric hospital is not. Dealing on a daily basis with disturbed people who have committed a severe crime requires a highly professional attitude. For the professional working in this field, individual thoughts and feelings (of disgust of the criminal and his crime for example, so common amongst the public) are not an option, while at the same time the given means for doing the work are highly dependent on public opinion as expressed by the media and political spokesmen. Ed Brand, forensic psychologist for more than thirty years, describes the change in risk management which took place in those years on the social and political level in the treatment of psychiatric disturbed offenders. In his account he also refers to the changes in his personal life before he stopped his work in state prisons and forensic psychiatric hospitals.

In this article former judge Jaap Tielenius Kruythoff tries to answer the question how being a judge influenced his personality and vice versa. Decision-making is both a rational and emotional process. Judges are susceptible for being manipulated by litigants and colleagues as well as acknowledgements from others. The author stresses the importance of having the possibility to express doubts in the course of the decision-making process between judges. Trying to erase doubts – for instance when one judge is dominating discussions in the judge’s chambers – interferes in finding the real truth in a case. Also, colleagues can help creating awareness of tunnel vision. According to the author there is no such a thing as a general sense of just punishment. Discussions about reasonable punishments are influenced by previous decisions. Being a judge gave the author a lot of fulfilment in his work and a higher social status.