This article is about the history of the justice of the peace, a low profile judge where people easily have access to. The history of the justice of the peace goes back to the seventeenth century. The justice of the peace was reintroduced in the Netherlands in the French period, when the country was annexed by the French Empire under the reign of Napoleon. The justice of the peace was also introduced in Belgium and is still in use. The most important task of the justice of the peace is ‘conciliation’. In the conciliation procedure the justice of the peace has a very active role. The judge tries to mediate between the parties in order to come to an agreement.

In Dutch courts several pilots are being carried out in order to enhance the quality of civil procedure. The main focus of the pilots is to speed up the procedure and make it more cost-effective, while ensuring the procedure is easily accessible and is overseen by a mediating judge in a nearby court. This focus largely corresponds with aspects of the civil procedure that the courts and the minister of Justice have identified as in need of attention. The courts and the minister have focused on different specific problems and propose different solutions, however, and neither aims to address the quality of civil procedure as a whole. It is doubtful whether the proposals for improvement, put forward by the courts and the minister, can address the concerns they have intended to resolve and whether the overall quality of the civil procedure (for all civil cases instead of the simple ones) will be improved. Solutions to the problems of the civil procedure cannot be devised without first developing a clear picture of the problems people experience with civil procedures and the courts.

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.

There are different types of banning orders (criminal, administrative and private banning orders) and also various procedures for imposing these orders. According to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (EctHR) it is unlikely that the private banning orders can be labelled as a criminal charge. The nature of the private banning orders is not punitive. These orders are to be regarded as recovery sanctions. However, applying the ‘Engel criteria’ will lead to the conclusion that some criminal banning orders are to be considered as a criminal charge. Accumulation between criminal and private law banning orders might be troublesome, but it is possible. It is recommended that the Public Prosecution Service is cautious when it comes to demanding a criminal banning order, when a private banning order has already been imposed.

The semi-public domain covers the places that are accessible to the public but which are controlled by private entities. Shopping malls, public transport, bars and sports events are examples of such places. In case of misconduct, the private manager may impose exclusion orders. This sanction relies on legal contracts and the exclusive nature of the right to property. The legal framework consists therefore primarily of private law. Exclusion orders may not be imposed without reason. Prevention of disorder and harm may be a legitimate reason. The length and range of the ban must relate to the gravity of the disruption. In addition to this, public laws on non-discrimination and privacy are applicable. The civil court is competent to check the exclusion orders in de semi-public domain. The author sees added value in complaints committees, in which both public and private actors partake. Complaint committees can thrive if their assessment frameworks are transparent.

This article focuses on witness protection programs for (former) criminals who witness against suspects in criminal procedures. It goes without saying that these witnesses run the risk of becoming the target of a contract killing. The author describes the conditions of admission to a witness protection program, as well as the various existing types of protection. Witnesses themselves are often not very enthusiastic about the program. Since they themselves have a criminal past, they look at the police as their enemy and often prefer to receive a lump sum and arrange their safety themselves, as becomes clear from several examples provided by the author.

This contribution explores the hypothesis that the rise of social media use and smartphone possession since 2007 contributed substantially to the international decrease in juvenile crime. The author addresses three processes that aid in understanding how social media and smartphones may have contributed to decreasing juvenile crime statistics. First, activity patterns of young people may have been altered in such a way that substantial less time is spent with unstructured socializing in public places. Second, the rise of social media may have led to additional and alternative possibilities to fulfill psychological and social needs of adolescents, taking away many immaterial motivations for juvenile crime. Third, it is possible that social media and smartphone use have facilitated a shift from offline to online juvenile crime, which is less detected and visible in official crime figures. While these theoretical arguments make the hypothesis plausible, research is needed to provide empirical evidence on the role of social media and smartphones in juvenile crime.

In the regulation of private law relationships, the concept of informed choice-making is an important point of departure for policymakers. As a result, professionals and traders are often under a legal duty to offer certain information to the public in order to inform, persuade or warn against dangers. Policymakers and academics alike tend to refer to findings from purely experimental studies to underpin the effects and overall effectiveness of such information duties. This contribution argues that such studies have limited value as a basis for policymaking. Moreover, it is argued here that policymakers may in fact benefit from practice-oriented research which lacks significant findings.

Neighborhood watch schemes have become increasingly popular in the Netherlands. Drawing from data from 340 municipalities and fieldwork in four districts, the article shows how neighborhood watch groups have developed in the Netherlands and illustrates how they contribute to lower crime levels and collective efficacy, advancing theoretical notions from the literature. However, this form of coproduction of public safety is not without its moral problems. Stigmatization, ethnic profiling and excessive social control are real issues.

This article gives an overview of the changes in the Dutch marital property regimes during the last twenty years. This is preceded by a discourse sketching the reasons for this legal modernization trajectory and the history of the community of property and standard prenuptial agreements.

This article gives a compact overview of developments in national and European law regarding same-sex partners. Over the last decades, new legal family formats (such as registered partnership and de facto union) have been made available in a growing number of countries. The number of countries that have opened up marriage to same-sex couples is also growing. Authors of comparative family law have proposed various classifications of the new legal family formats. Meanwhile, an increasing number of EU laws now acknowledge non-marital partners. The European Courts have been asked several times to rule on controversial differentiations between different legal family formats or between same-sex and different-sex partners. In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights one can find examples of affirmative eloquence which suggest that more steps towards full legal recognition of same-sex families could be expected.

The arrival of asylum seekers has become a major political and social issue in Europe recently, although not for the first time in history. This article describes and analyses the reasons why growing numbers of undocumented migrants come to Europe, many of them as asylum seekers. One important reason is growing political instability in a ring of countries that surround the EU. The article also describes the different routes undocumented migrants take to the EU, the rapid changes that occur in the choice of routes, and the backgrounds of these changes. Although most attention goes to the risky transit in the Central Mediterranean area, and the number of migrants taking this route is growing, a majority of asylum seekers has reached the EU via other routes. Finally, this article also indicates roads towards finding solutions to the issue; this can only be achieved in the context of the EU.

In light of the high numbers of persons entering the EU via the southern borders and the current uneven distribution of asylum seekers (five Member States of the EU currently received in 2014 more than 70% of the total amount of refugees), there is a clear and urgent need for the EU ministers to ensure a fairer distribution of asylum seekers within the EU. The Dublin Regulation’s system of allocating the responsibility for an asylum request does not offer a solution for this challenge, also because Member States cannot have a blind faith in the standards of a number of states for processing asylum requests. There are significant differences in the application of the law and the procedures.

In this article the authors use empirical data from the Dutch Organised Crime Monitor to give empirical insight into the investments of organised crime offenders in legal economy. Using a dataset of 1,196 individual investments, they look into what kind of assets offenders purchase and where these assets are located. The authors use the empirical results to assess the tenability of different theoretical perspectives and assumptions that are present in the literature on money laundering and organised crime: the standard economic approach, the criminal infiltration approach and the social opportunity structure. The results of this study show that offenders predominantly invest in their home country and that their investments consist of tangible, familiar assets such as residences and other real estate and companies from well-known sectors. Investments such as bonds as well as stocks in companies in which offenders are not personally involved, were only found in a small number of cases. To put it differently: offenders usually stay close to home with their investments. Based on these results, the concept of social opportunity structure seems to be best suited to understand offenders’ investment choices.

Offshore companies play a substantial role in the laundering of dirty money, especially in bigger cases. This article reflects on the definition of offshore companies and analyses several cases of money laundering through these often complicated financial business structures. The lack of knowledge on offshore money laundering practices hampers criminal investigation worldwide. Improving the registration of cases and sharing knowledge internationally would help to develop better prevention measures and to detect money laundering through offshore companies. The author also provides a list of risk indicators signalizing possible abuse of offshore companies.

Criminal law is embedded in a specific view of man and the world. This thesis implies that a change of the view of man and the world leads necessarily to a change of criminal law. Since our view of man and the world is constantly changing, the same applies for our law governing wrongful conduct. In this article is described how our view of man and the world has changed through the ages (during pre-modernity and modernity) and what changes have occurred under the influence thereof. Given the limited size of this article, a macro-perspective is utilized. At the end of the article, the author advocates a new (trans-modern) view of man and the world and a new corresponding law governing wrongful conduct.

The Roma and Sinti (formerly called gypsies) have a language of their own called Romani or Romanes. The language has been present in the Netherlands since 1420, and the first documentation from our country dates from the 1500s. Linguists have established that the language is a continuation of Indian languages. The dialects of Romani from all corners of Europe also show the clear unity of the language. It is not – as sometimes supposed – a secret jargon. After centuries of neglect or downright oppression of the people and their language, Romani is now recognized at the national and European levels. This also led to an increasing use of a written language, used for all genres, from literature to cookbooks and political texts. Despite having been spoken beside other languages for over a millennium, its vitality is higher than for all of the more recent immigrant languages in the Netherlands.

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.

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.