Het dossier speelt in het Nederlandse strafprocesrecht een centrale rol. Zonder het dossier kunnen de snelheid en de efficiëntie van het huidige (en toekomstige) strafproces niet worden gewaarborgd. De processtukken zijn leidend tijdens de voorbereiding van de rechters en de griffier voorafgaand aan en tijdens het onderzoek ter terechtzitting. Deze werkwijze – het voorbereiden van het onderzoekt ter terechtzitting aan de hand van het dossier – volgt niet dwingend uit enige wettelijke bepaling. De rechterlijke voorbereiding van het onderzoek ter terechtzitting aan de hand van het dossier krijgt weinig aandacht in de rechtswetenschappelijke literatuur en het rechtspsychologische experimentele onderzoek. Hiervoor zou meer aandacht moeten bestaan omdat uit het wel beschikbare experimentele onderzoek blijkt dat de voorbereiding op basis van het dossier significante invloed heeft op het uiteindelijke rechterlijke oordeel. In deze bijdrage staat de kwestie centraal of de Modernisering van het Wetboek van Strafvordering aanpassingen in het wettelijk kader betreffende het dossier voorziet, en of deze aanpassingen veranderingen teweegbrengen in het gebruik van het dossier ten behoeve van de voorbereiding van het onderzoek ter terechtzitting.

Have recent food fraud cases, combined with a lack of priority and regulatory framework for combating food fraud and increased involvement of organized crime, caused a crisis of the European food chain? To what extent does this necessitate a European response? This article argues that the crisis in consumer confidence caused by cross-border fraud must be urgently addressed at national and EU level and that combating food fraud should be a priority next to the enforcement of food safety rules. Necessary changes of EU rules applicable to the sector and its controls should be made through the EU decision-making process. The European Parliament recommends an approach that should define food fraud to enable the development of EU policy, facilitate cross-border cooperation and information-sharing between member states and encourage sector initiatives, whereas its enforcement should focus on altering the type of controls by public authorities and installing tougher penalties.

Food fraud is as old as mankind but has advanced in the last decades. Fraud regarding the gross composition of food has progressed in the direction of the addition of unconventional adulterants. Furthermore, consumers are more and more interested in how and where their foods are produced and pay price premiums for organic foods, fair trade, animal welfare considering, and sustainable food products. Since these products are very similar to their conventional counterparts in terms of composition, they provide an additional challenge. The knowledge regarding occurrence, type of meat fraud, causes and damage caused to the sector is limited. There is a need for extensive identification of the vulnerabilities and criminogenic factors. These insights offer leads for detection and prevention. The article deals with a first step into the inventory of these vulnerabilities and factors affecting meat fraud, by assessing fraud risks related to products, companies and the meat supply chain.

This paper studies the development of the sentences that were imposed by criminal courts in the Netherlands over the period 1995-2012. Available data cover all principal sanctions: (unconditional) prison sentences, community service orders and fines. A decomposition is made to separate the gravity of sentencing (changes in the type and severity of the sanctions) from size effects (changes in the composition of the criminal cases dealt with). The gravity of sentencing is found to oscillate over the period 1995-2012. There is (as yet) no clear trend towards heavier sentencing, contrary to recent claims by Dutch judicial authorities.

Victims of violent crime who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can request financial compensation from the Dutch Violent Offences Compensation Fund (VOCF). Problematic with this is that PTSD is amenable for malingering. Malingering involves the invention or exaggeration of psychological symptoms or the attribution of such symptoms to wrong causes. If malingered PTSD remains undetected, the VOCF will run the risk of compensating damages which do not exist. The literature suggests that malingering can be detected by focusing on extreme scores on symptom screeners. The results of the current study, however, seem to suggest that this may not be an adequate strategy.

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.

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.

This article argues that the right to have rights, as launched by Hannah Arendt, is relative to refugee displacement and hence translates as a right to asylum. It takes issue with the dominant view that the public/private divide is the locus classicus of the meaning of this primordial right. A different direction of thought is proposed, proceeding from Arendt’s recovery of the spatiality of law. The unencompassibility of place in matters of rights, freedom and equality brings this right into view as a claim at the behest of those who have lost a legal place of their own. This also helps us to gain better understanding of Arendt’s rebuttal of the sharp-edged distinction between refugees and stateless persons and to discover the defiant potential of the right to have rights to illuminate the refugee’s claim to asylum as a claim to an own place where protection can be enjoyed again.

In deze bijdrage wordt via een rechtsvergelijkende analyse betoogd dat de teleurgestelde crediteur in het geval van opzettelijke wanprestatie toegang zou moeten hebben tot strengere sancties dan het contractenrecht normaal gesproken biedt. De teleurgestelde crediteur zou bijvoorbeeld eerder nakoming moeten kunnen vorderen, in ruimere mate tegemoet moeten worden gekomen in bewijs en begroting van de schade ter grootte van het positief contractsbelang, een hogere schadevergoeding moeten kunnen claimen, eerder toegang moeten hebben tot winstafdracht en eerder moeten kunnen ontbinden.

Both in punishment theory and sentencing practices, the subjective sentence severity is an important yet neglected area of research. This paper aims to explain differences between inmates in their subjective severity of imprisonment and to contemplate these against the background of important sentencing goals and sentencing principles. Two models commonly used to explain adjustment to prison life were applied: the import and deprivation model. Data from the Prison Project, collected among Dutch inmates staying in pretrial detention, reveal that both import and deprivation characteristics are related to the subjective severity of imprisonment. No support is found for a moderation effect of personality.

How do organisations collaborate in the daily practice of law enforcement? And what role plays autonomy of government agencies within this cooperation? In this article the authors answer these questions on the base of two case studies: two large scale projects in which a partnership approach was used to combat human trafficking in the Netherlands. Collaboration between city administration, investigation services and tax authorities seems to be very hard to put into practice. This is understandable from the theory that government agencies, while performing their tasks, are focused on achieving autonomy.

Sentencing research focusing solely on unsuspended imprisonment does no justice to the practice of sentencing, where many other punishment types are imposed – often conjunctly. To investigate to what extent this imprisonment bias might have caused incomplete and thereby biased findings, we compare the effects of offender characteristics for imprisonment to those for other sanction types, as well as to a model combining sanction types. Findings suggest that the effects of offender characteristics differ per sanction type. When combinations of sanction types are taken into account, some offender characteristics do no longer have mitigating or aggravating effects, or the effects even inverted. Hence, future sentencing research should aim to include all sentences imposed.

Subcultural theory and cultural criminology have traditionally viewed ‘underground’ youth movements as providing images of deviance/resistance which the cultural industries harvest to turn a profit. The logic follows that street and sub cultures imbue products with a ‘transgressive edge’ that increases their appeal within youth markets. This paper uses the example of UK ‘grime’ music to demonstrate how this dynamic cannot be viewed as applying universally in contemporary times. Where their street orientated content is censured, many grime artistes express a desire for commercial success which would ultimately emerge through muting their rhetorical links to crime and violence and explicitly championing ‘mainstream’ values. This case is used as an empirical cue to explore the use and critique of the concept of ‘resistance’ within cultural criminology and subcultural theory. The paper problematizes commodification of resistance discourses as they apply to the rugged culture of the streets and indeed its supposed ‘oppositional’ character where disadvantaged urban youth clearly embody and practice the logic of neoliberalism. It furthermore suggests that certain critiques of cultural criminology go too far in denying any meaning to criminality and subcultural practice beyond consumer desire. Ultimately, the concept of ‘defiance’ is suggested as a useful tool to understand the norms of and behaviours of the excluded.

The politization of the concept of genocide by Western states has been severely criticised, because it has led to an impunity for genocidal crimes. In certain instances however, such criticism has contributed to the dynamic of victimization, instead of resisting it. The article discusses how Professor Edward S. Herman and journalist David Peterson’s staunch criticism of the politics of genocide amounts to a brazen denial of the genocide against the Tutsi which recycles much of the extremist discourse of the former Rwandan authorities that were implicated in genocide. In this case Herman and Peterson’s resistance against the politics of genocide has profound implications, several of which the article will address.

This article provides a theoretical analysis of the label ‘resistance’. It sets out from the premise that the notion of resistance, although it has been current in criminology for some time, is still vaguely defined. We argue that resistance is not just a negative term, but can also be seen as a positive and creative force in society. As such, the primary function of resistance is to serve as a solvent of doxa, to continuously question obviousness and common sense. In the process of resistance we distinguish three processes: invention, imitation and transformation. The third stage warrants deeper investigation within cultural criminology.

This article examines the transformations in form and function of rituals in the squatting movement in Amsterdam. Upon roaring early years, rituals emerged around the search for houses to squat, the actual squatting and evictions. These rituals were recognized and used by squatters as well as other parties and they have contributed to the reduction of violence. Meanwhile, squatting in the Netherlands was prohibited and the question arises if, in this new situation, form and function of rituals have changed too. The findings shed some light on the broader link between rituals and resistance.

This article deals with three questions. What did resistance mean in the 1970s and what does it mean today? Have the rituals of resistance changed over time? What is the status today of moral panic theory? These questions directly refer to ‘Resistance Through Rituals’ (1976) and ‘Policing the Crisis’ (1978). For that reason, one of the authors answers these key questions in a contemporary framework of hegemony, security and neoliberal politics, and points to the continuing relevance of the political and critical tradition of British cultural studies.

Giuseppe De Palo and Romina Canessa give a description of the recent publication of a study conducted for the European Parliament on Mediation, ‘Rebooting the Mediation Directive: Assessing the Limited Impact of its Implementation and Proposing Measures to Increase the Number of Mediations in the EU’, has contributed to the ongoing debate about effective mediation policy. The Study concluded that despite an increase in mediation awareness and the proven benefits it can have, mediation still remains largely unused as a method of dispute resolution.

The Macedonian system of civil enforcement has long been construed as a reflection of the principle of “re-adjudication upon the original request for legal protection”. The worryingly low execution rate and the excessive length of the enforcement procedure have imposed the necessity of urgent “restructuring” of the entirety of the enforcement system, and the Dutch model has served as an excellent role-model. This article provides a short overview of the characteristic features of the Macedonian enforcement system, and the degree to which they correspond to the Dutch model of civil enforcement.

Kan een wettelijke verplichting voor Nederlandse scholen tot het hebben van een op effectiviteit getoetst antipestprogramma bijdragen aan een effectievere aanpak van pesten op scholen? Op grond van wetenschappelijk onderzoek is de conclusie dat dat niet aannemelijk is. Scholen passen programma’s aan de eigen inzichten en opvattingen aan, zonder dat duidelijk is of deze aanpassingen de effectiviteit positief of negatief beïnvloeden. Het accent wordt in het plan van aanpak ten onrechte gelegd op het hebben van een effectief programma, in plaats van op de effectieve aanpak van alle, uiteenlopende soorten van pesten in een prosociale cultuur op scholen.