Safety authorities in The Netherlands have the obligation to develop so-called risk-profiles. Risk profiles are probability-consequences schemes of all kinds of hazards (ranging from earth quakes to transportation and from floodings to fires in high rise buildings). To develop such schemes, various data sources could be useful. In this paper, we describe an approach to make use of existing database to reveal ‘new’ kinds of transportation-related risks. To this end, we combined publicly available public and private databases related to: hazardous materials transportation and Natura 2000 areas; congested areas and large scale public events; hazardous materials transportation and multi-functional areas.
Our approach makes clear that combination of existing databases has great potential for the safety authorities to develop their risk profiles, do their business intelligence and creating steering dash-boards for their own budget allocations.

Using summated scale scores to make group comparisons is only meaningful if one can assume that the scale measures attribute in the same way in each of the groups involved in the comparison. This assumption is called measurement invariance. This contribution discusses the use of modern statistical measurement models to test this assumption and to verify the consequences of a possible violation for the comparison of group means. In the empirical part of the contribution the authors illustrate their account by examining whether a scale assessing avoidance behavior – commonly used in fear of crime research – is invariant across gender and age groups.

Is naast een geslaagd beroep op dwaling plaats voor schadevergoeding wegens een tekortkoming in een overeengekomen garantie? De Hoge Raad overweegt ontkennend: de vernietiging wegens dwaling treft in beginsel ook deze garantie, en dus is er geen sprake van een tekortkoming daarin. Een beschouwing over samenloop van dwaling en wanprestatie.

Het privaatrechtelijke goederenrecht wordt functioneel door de Europese Unie bestreken. Dat heeft geleid tot fragmentatie en ondersystematisering. Helder en kritisch analyseert Ramaekers het Europese goederenrechtelijk acquis. Zij pleit voor een optioneel Europees raamwerk van goederenrecht, in te voeren bij verordening, en daartoe geeft zij een mooie aanzet.

Here the authors report on the seminar ‘(Labor) Mediation in Belgium; Chances, challenges and bottlenecks’, which took place on September 11^th, 2013. During this seminar a debate took place between several mediation stakeholders in Belgium.

Recent labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe has, next to positive economic facets, also negative aspects like nuisance. This article describes the nature of this nuisance and the circumstances causing this. According to key informants who have been interviewed for this study, the nuisances discussed in this article pertain to only a small part of the labour migrants. The nuisance related to labour migrants from Central and Eastern Europe mostly consists of loud ‘noises of living’ around the home and in public space. Considering the nuisance, the following aspects seem to be part of the cause: thin-walled houses and the (illegal) letting per room; poor commitment to the neighbourhood due to temporary stay; quarrels and acts of violence between labour migrants and excessive drinking; lack of privacy and therefore meeting in public space; and housing in neighbourhoods with an accumulation of social issues. In this article the authors describe these aspects and their occurrence.

The rapid and ongoing development of the Internet has greatly affected new types and sources of conflict but also the ways conflicts are handled. Nowadays, more and more mediation service providers offer online tools to manage conflicts, going from fully e-supported mediations to hybrid mediations which are partly face to face (F2F) and partly computerized. Despite the increasing use of different types of e-supported mediation, practitioners and scholars know little about their effects or under which conditions different types of e-supported tools are best used. This contribution focuses on the role e-tools may play in text based mediations (mainly labor and divorce mediations) which are mediated by a human mediator. We hope to provide third parties of all sort (mediators, practitioners, consultants, managers, etc.) with practical guidelines for the use of e-supported mediation.

Intelligence Led Policing (ILP) is an increasingly important concept for policing. ILP is about analyzing information and knowledge and using these analyses to support decision making about police work. The implementation of ILP is characterized by different stages of development. In this paper we describe each stage by five aspects. The stages are: intuition, justify actions, guiding actions and prescribing actions. The five aspects are: collecting information, analyzing information, presenting analyses, interaction and using analyses.

Hierarchical (labor) conflicts have a unique dynamic. Although power dynamics play a role in many interactions, they may play a crucial role in labor conflicts affecting the conflict itself and the subsequent mediation. In this paper, we look at the concept of power as well as different power sources in order to get more grip on the power balance between disputants. We show that when parties hold and/or perceive different power positions, parties differ strongly with regard to their perception of the conflict, their emotional experience but also their (conflict) behavior. For example, where a labor conflict may represent a very personal and painful event for the less powerful, it may be just one of the many tasks the more powerful has to deal with. Consequently, parties have different needs and expectations in order to solve the conflict. Knowledge of these processes is essential if one wishes to acquire insight in the power balance between disputants and/or intervene in labor conflicts.

De afgelopen jaren is door de Hoge Raad een ‘gezichtspuntencatalogus’ ontwikkeld aan de hand waarvan kan worden getoetst of in een concreet geval aan de klachtplicht van art. 6:89 en 7:23 lid 1 BW is voldaan. In deze bijdrage wordt het arrest Ploum/Smeets II van 25 maart 2011, LJN BP8991, RvdW 2011, 419, besproken waarin deze gezichtspuntencatalogus is uitgebreid en nader is uitgewerkt.

This article examines the Belgian legislation aimed at safeguarding the confidential nature of mediation. It takes the perspective of all actors involved in the mediation process: the parties to the dispute, the mediator and experts or witnesses who participate in the mediation.

Bestaat de ‘tweede fase’ uit Plas/Valburg nog? Deze vraag houdt de gemoederen al geruime tijd bezig, met name na het arrest JPO/CBB. Uit de traditionele interpretatie van de zogenaamde driefasenleer zoals zich die in de literatuur heeft ontwikkeld naar aanleiding van het arrest Plas/Valburg volgde dat er zich tijdens de onderhandelingen een stadium kan voordoen waarin het partijen weliswaar nog vrij staat om de onderhandelingen eenzijdig af te breken, maar alleen wanneer – kort gezegd – de kosten die de onderhandelingspartner heeft gemaakt, worden vergoed. Hoewel de Hoge Raad sedert het arrest Plas/Valburg nimmer meer aan dit ‘stadium’ heeft gerefereerd, lijkt deze ‘tweede fase’ zich in de lagere jurisprudentie inmiddels een vaste plaats verworven te hebben en komt er langzaam maar zeker meer duidelijkheid over belangrijke vragen als: wat is de juridische grondslag voor een vordering die op deze ‘tweede fase’ is gebaseerd? Wanneer treedt die ‘tweede fase’ in? En welke schade kan worden gevorderd? Deze en aanverwante problematiek staat centraal in dit artikel.

Gender, in criminological research, often refers to women. Although ‘masculinities’ and crime have been intertwined internationally for more than two decades, this isn’t so for Dutch research. Based on this international critique, this article introduces the masculinities approach in Dutch penology. Prisons are generally considered as hypermasculine settings (Toch, 1998), but this hypothesis is seldom explored within a gender framework. Nevertheless, ‘doing masculinity’ is an important coping strategy for male prisoners (Jewkes, 2005). This gap is tackled on two levels: (1) the conceptualization of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and (2) a critical, masculinity-oriented analysis of the existing knowledge on prison life, prison culture and prison hierarchy. It aims to tackle prison masculinity stereotypes, since traditional penal insights aren’t necessarily valid from a gender point of view (Evans & Wallace, 2008). Therefore, we conclude by analyzing the value of masculinity studies for penology.

This contribution examines the European Directive 2008/52/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2008 on certain aspects of mediation in civil and commercial matters and deals with the question whether the Belgian law on mediation, namely Articles 1724 to 1737 of the Belgian Judicial Code, as introduced into the Belgian law in 2005, need to be amended in the light of the Directive. It concludes that in some aspects the Belgian law ought to be improved so to implement some provisions of the Directive not yet dealt with in the law of 2005. It recommends to include in the Belgian law a definition on mediation, and also to stipulate which Belgian institution in particular shall provide the requested information on mediation and communicate with the European authorities. The contribution also suggests to consider introducing into the Belgian law a mechanism to promote mediation through incentives and/or sanctions, for which the measures recently adopted in the English legal system might possibly serve as an example.

The focus of this article is the relation between the factual conditions of the environmental quality of streets and neighborhoods and the perception of livability by residents.Through analysis of evaluation of environmental quality by residents, combined with observations by trained professionals of certain aspects of the environment (population, demography, type of housing etcetera) it was possible to identify the relations between the way livability is perceived, aspects of the neighborhood and household characteristics. By zooming in on the aspects environmental and personal security and safety the article shows how the environmental quality influences residents perceptions.