Ethnic profiling by governments unfortunately has a worldwide interest. If we look at the Dutch situation, it turns out that the problem is not limited to the police. Serious problems also arise when it comes to checking the legality of tax benefits and detecting benefit fraud. In this contribution, the authors draw attention to racial discrimination due to the use of profiles by government institutions in the Netherlands. It seems that our anti-discrimination legislation is in good order and that raises the question of whether legal refinement is needed or whether solutions should be sought outside the legal sphere. The authors think the latter strategy and make suggestions for a more holistic solution direction.

Xenophobic tendencies in the migration discourse in the EU are thought to make asylum seekers and irregular migrants more vulnerable for hate crimes by individuals or groups. In a similar vein, migration control measures are said to be associated with the increase in xenophobia and hate crimes against these migrants. This article discusses the possible relationships between the process of crimmigration and hate crimes against migrants in the EU.

Students in law school learn to understand the legal system, rulings, and laws. Teachers emphasize the importance of legal principles and democratic values such as freedom and equality. However, at the same time, the society in which the aspiring lawyers will work is often built on structures of inequality, exclusion, and injustice. Law schools have the opportunity and the moral responsibility to make their students aware of the inevitable gap between ideals and the application of laws that facilitate or sustain social injustice. To this end, some reflection on the human tendency to bias and moral overestimation is a necessary first step. This reflection paves the way for the introduction of different theoretical perspectives on justice and injustice within the legal curriculum. Students learn to question and to reconsider dominant assumptions and points of view. These skills are fundamental to develop into lawyers who not only enforce the laws as they exist today but also consider how those laws may or may not be contributing to the preservation of democratic values in our society.

Article 273f, paragraph 1, subparagraph 3, of the Dutch Penal Code criminalizes, as trafficking in human beings, the act of recruiting, removing or abducting another person with the intention of inducing this person to make himself available, in another country, for the performance of sexual acts with or for a third party for remuneration. This provision, deriving from an international convention established in 1933, has always been a bit of an oddity in the Dutch penal provision on trafficking in human beings since it is not necessary to prove that the prostitute involved was lured or otherwise forced into prostitution and prostitution is legalized in the Netherlands. The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled in a landmark case in 2016, that the act criminalized in subparagraph 3 can only be punishable in situations where it can be said that the recruiting, removing or abduction of the prostitute occurred under circumstances that can be qualified as exploitation. This contribution sheds light on the historical backgrounds of this remarkable penal provision, its particularities and the recent case law of the Supreme Court. It demonstrates that the development of this provision and the discussion it sparks, embody the more general quest, in criminal law, to strike a balance between protecting individual liberty on the one side and protecting vulnerable persons on the other.

Article 14 (4) of the Netherlands Nationality Act (RwN) gives the minister of Justice and Security the authority to revoke the Dutch citizenship if that person has voluntarily joined a terrorist organisation that is a threat to national security. In this article, which is based on an evaluation study of article 14 (4) commissioned by the Research and Documentation Center of the Ministry of Justice and Security, the authors discuss the decision-making process of revocation of the Dutch nationality based on article 14 (4) in practice. This article also provides empirical data on this decision-making process, such as on the number of times the Dutch nationality was revoked and the outcomes of court proceedings about article 14 (4) cases.

In the Netherlands, the penalization of human smuggling has become broader and more severe. This development is part of a crimmigration trend that describes an increase of immigration-related criminal offenses. Currently, the provision does not include a financial component, nor does it exclude acts with a humanitarian motive. The validity of such severe prohibitions, especially those including acts that are not morally reprehensible, is questioned through the concept of ‘humanitarian smuggling’. Moral reprehensibility is one of the criteria for criminalization that provide a framework for the reflection on the Dutch prohibition of human smuggling that is conducted in this article.

Since 2007, a statute has been in force in the Netherlands (the Wet inburgering or Act on Civic Integration) that provides for a system of fines that can be imposed on certain classes of immigrants for not passing the ‘civic integration exam’, testing knowledge of Dutch language and culture, by a certain deadline. However, the way in which the statute defines the precise obligations on immigrants, which classes of immigrants have those obligations, what the exact deadline is and when it can be extended leaves much to be desired in terms of legal certainty, especially considering the frequent changes that the legislature of the Netherlands makes to the statute. Morever, since a fine is imposed as a penalty for what is effectively a ‘criminal charge’ (in the sense of article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights), what role does the establishment in a fair trial of the immigrant’s culpability play in the imposition of such a fine? For a completely different perspective on integration policy, the author discusses the 2015 decision P. and S. of the Court of Justice of the European Union, in which he was the legal representative of the plaintiffs. When an immigrant is a beneficiary of an EU directive providing for immigration rights for third-country nationals, the Court holds that it is permissible to impose fines in order to stimulate the immigrant’s integration in the society of the host member state, but that such a penalty may not go so far as to actively endanger the goal of aiding integration. In general, the Court is highly sceptical of the effectiveness and fairness of the system of fines provided for by the Act on Civic Integration. The author concludes that the Act, with its clear emphasis on punishment rather than promotion of civic integration, ultimately has the effect of criminalising entire classes of immigrants to the Netherlands.