This article aims to clarify the phenomenon of iconoclasm and how it impacts today’s society, in spite of the lack of research on this topic. After establishing its complex and sensitive nature, a first assessment containing types of iconoclasm and various motives of iconoclasts is presented. Different forms of iconoclasm are distinguished, explained and illustrated using examples. Special attention is given to the subject’s sensitivity in modern society while establishing the connection of the topic with identity in multiple shapes and forms. The article aims at contributing to a future multi-disciplinary debate.

A characteristic difference between administration of justice and mediation so far was the element of voluntariness on the side of the clients. Administration of justice however is, for the citizen who is brought before the courts, not voluntary. Recently pilots have been started in which citizens can turn voluntarily to the Court at low cost, and not far from their neighborhood. Judges will not primarily aim at making a decision in accordance with the law, but at finding friendly solutions. Does this mean that judges are going to mediate? And if so, how should this be appreciated? In this contribution attention is paid to certain aspects of this question. It is argued that differences between jurisdiction and mediation still remain. More than mediators judges must act within the legal framework. The extent to which they can engage in the emotional undercurrent of conflicts is limited. Confidence in the Court is from a different origin than trust in the mediator, and that also makes a difference. And finally, a judge is competent to make a binding judgment, which influences the way he or she is looked at by the parties.

The tremendously popular television programme De Rijdende Rechter (The Itinerant Judge) has an uncomfortable relationship with official legal practice. Many people indeed think that the itinerant judge who arrives in their street to personally check neighbourly grievances has come as a representative of the Law with a capital L. It is not clear where reality TV stops and current legal practice begins. Things have become more complicated because the itinerant judge has become a symbol of the ‘close-to-the-people’ judge that is embraced by legal practice today. In this article the murky boundary between TV judges and official judiciary is investigated, taking into account the cult status of the itinerant judge, the effect of imagination on reality, similar phenomena in the United States and the current situation in the Netherlands.

The new Intelligence and Security Services Act 2017 has generated a lot of criticism in The Netherlands. Although the act was adopted in parliament in July 2017, the implementation will take place in May 2018. Beforehand an advisory referendum will give the public the opportunity to express their opinion on the new act: the modernisation of the investigatory powers of the services and the strengthening of the necessary safeguards and oversight mechanisms. Both have met with their share of criticism. In this paper the focus is on the enhanced oversight mechanism. It is argued that although different choices could have been made regarding the organisation of oversight, the new system fulfills the requirements set by the European Court of Human Rights. The real question is whether the new act provides for effective and strong oversight in practice to ensure a proper balance between national security and privacy protection in this digital era. The opportunities and challenges are explored.

Last year, Dutch parliament approved the proposal for a new Intelligence and Security Services Act (Wiv 2017). This law will replace the current Intelligence and Security Services Act 2002 (Wiv 2002). The Wiv 2017 should be considered feasible with effect from 1 May 2018. Before that time however, an advisory referendum on the new law will be held on 21 March. This article first discusses the nature of the law and the need for innovation. Subsequently, a comparison of both laws takes place in general terms, with regard to the powers of the intelligence and security services, the safeguards, the supervision, the complaint handling and the international cooperation between intelligence and security services. It is argued that the extension of the powers of the services in the Wiv 2017 is only limited in scope, while the safeguards have been considerably strengthened. The introduction of a binding judgment in complaint handling also contributes to a better and more effective legal protection for citizens.

Europe is commonly depicted as the cradle of modernity. But this image usually has a blind eye for marginal communities and cultures existing seemingly apart of the big developments. An example of this is the neglect of the Roma people who settled here early, on the threshold of the Middle Ages and the modern era. The attitude of the European people towards this mobile ethnic group can be described as moving between contempt and fascination. Referring to images of gypsies in literature and other cultural expressions the author shows how during the Romantic era the gypsies were serving as a projection object for desires and fantasies about socially deviant lifestyles. The subsequent process of ‘de-Europeanization’ together with the creation of exotic images through ethnology is described as well as the racial theories and their political consequences for the Roma people in the twentieth century. Instead of contributing to the creation of borderlines and fuelling destruction fantasies, art and sciences should give more attention to the undividedness of humankind and to human dignity.

Food fraud has recently been recognized as a blind spot among regulators. In Europe, few organizations have experience with large cases of food fraud; also scientific knowledge into this type of crime is limited. This article aims to contribute experience to this gap. The NVWA-IOD is a specialist crime unit in the Netherlands, carrying out criminal investigations into, among other things, food fraud. This article gives insight into numbers of cases dealt with by the NVWA-IOD in the past fifteen years, for different types of food fraud. Nine criminal cases, concentrating on suspects within trade and industry, are analyzed in more detail from a basic criminological perspective. There is looked into, among other things, the motive, the opportunity and the product. The cases discussed relate to products such as meat, eggs, fish and dairy products. The main motive for committing food fraud is making money; the gain makes fraudulent activities attractive and financially beneficial. Opportunities refer mainly to ambiguous laws and regulations and little supervision. Also, evasive behavior was found. To combat food crime, specialist knowledge of tempting opportunities is essential.

This article contains an analysis of changes in the access to justice in administrative law disputes in the Netherlands. In analysing these changes, it is necessary to look not only at court procedures, but also at the objection procedure that precedes them. A large majority of administrative law disputes are resolved in such an informal objection procedure. The analysis shows that, more than the legislator and the administrative courts, administrative authorities are responsible for changes concerning (the interpretation and execution of the rules on) access to justice. They increasingly use their discretionary powers in the objection procedure to try to solve conflicts about their decisions by interpreting and using the rules of access in a flexible way.

In 1870 in the Netherlands the death penalty was replaced by the sanction nearest to that effect: lifelong imprisonment. For the government though this penalty was acceptable only in connection with the possibility of mercy. The sanction was to be executed humanely and should not result in torture. The way the sanction was executed since, the administration developed a policy of mercy taking into account the devastating effects of the sanction. This policy resulted in mental care for the convicted and his release after approximately twenty years imprisonment. More than hundred years later, about 2004, the policy of mercy changed. Since then, according to the responsible ministers, life imprisonment should end by the onset of death. In this article the practice under the old and the new policy is illustrated by a case study. The conclusion is that like the death penalty lifelong imprisonment corrodes the prestige of the State.

In the past decades, telecommunications traffic has grown explosively. There has been an enormous expansion of the use of mobile phones. In addition, the way in which these phones are used has changed as well. An ever growing number of mobile phones is connected to the Internet, and a growing share of communications take place through the Internet. As a result, communication gets increasingly fragmented, because of the various ways and channels available for communication. In this article, the authors discuss the possible implications of these developments for the use of the telephone tap as an investigative tool during criminal investigations. Furthermore, the authors examine the ways in which the internet tap can support or replace the use of the telephone tap. Finally, alternative investigation tools are discussed that might compensate the changing results of the telephone tap.

As a contribution to literature drawing together green criminology and studies of organized and corporate crime, this paper provides a case study of crimes and public health harms linked to the Naples garbage disposal crisis. The context is the inability of modern consumer society to cope with the problem of mass production of waste. In turn this leads to opportunities for both legal and criminal entrepreneurs to offer services that promise but fail to ‘dispose’ of the problem. The analysis draws upon environmental law and classic studies of organised crime.

When it comes to cybersecurity usually little attention is payed to internal threats, i.e. from within organizations themselves which may - intentional or not - breach the confidentiality of digitally stored information. When a secret reaches the media, it often generates a lot of public attention. Not only because of the content or the curiosity-value of the secret itself, but also because of the - sometimes shockingly simple - way the secret has been leaked. This kind of security breach in particular gives rise to negative publicity, which not only impacts the organization which it concerns, but also reflects badly on other peers in the sector, especially in the case of breaches that are government-related. In this article, the author explores the issues of the leaking of secrets in ‘cyberspace’ by using several examples - such as the WikiLeaks affair - to illustrate the effects of ICT developments in the last two to three decades on vulnerabilities in information security. The article then focuses on new developments in ‘Alternative Workplace Strategies’ and the related use of new technologies in relation to the vulnerabilities in information security. Organizations can reduce the threats by facilitating their employees with smart solutions which are also results of new technologies.

What does a religious perspective imply for the justification of the state imposing punishment on perpetrators of criminal offences under criminal law? As religion is experiencing a revival, it is not a strange idea to examine what a religious perspective can teach us in relation to criminal law. What religious fundamentalism and conservatism have to offer in this respect seems quite clear, namely retributive action by the state, as God's representative on earth, against conduct contrary to the dogmas of the Holy Scriptures. Nevertheless, research shows that conventional believers also often recognize the value of forgiveness and reconciliation. What is not clear, however, is what mysticism has to offer in relation to criminal law. In contradiction to conventional criminal law, from a mystical perspective there is no call for intentional infliction of pain in responding to crime. To avenge evil with evil is dismissed for both moral and practical reasons. Encouraging the spiritual awakening of man forms the alfa and omega of a mystical approach to crime.

This article analyzes how football game situations, especially those where players get injured, are posted within the law. In the Netherlands sport rules are not regulated in specific laws. An incident in the soccer pitch should be approached by the ordinary law: criminal law as well as liability. An important standard laid down in jurisdiction is that sport participants accept a certain risk to get hurt.
A conviction on the basis of criminal law occurs not very often, because it is hard to prove that the accused in a game situation had the intention to cause injury. The author gives an outline of the disciplinary rule structure of Dutch football. The Dutch football association KNVB has an important role in this structure. Every football player is a member of his own club as well as a member of the KNVB. As a consequence the club as well as the KNVB has the authority to take disciplinary action against football players breaking the rules. The disciplinary system and rules are different for professional and amateur football.

It is now well established that both the ‘war on terror’ and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This article - deliberately transdisciplinary, synthetical and polemical in scope - seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. By engaging with Michel Foucault's concept of the ‘boomerang effect’, this paper delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation - which surround what I label the ‘new military urbanism’ - raise fundamental questions for critical urban and political scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations. Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this paper explores four of the new military urbanism's inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the deep Foucauldian boomerangs linking experimentation with new architectures and technologies of control in war-zone and domestic cities; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; the ways in which practices and discourses of political violence and securitisation permeate the everyday infrastructures of cities; and the cultural performances of militarised media consumption. The paper concludes by identifying emerging counter-political and countergeographic activism as it seeks to challenge the normalization of the new military urbanism.