In 2020, a coalition against ethnic profiling established a taskforce to handle complaints of people who have experienced ethnic profiling by the Dutch Royal Military Police and/or the Dutch Customs at airports. In this article, 31 complaints that have been received between February 2020 and March 2021 have been analyzed in a qualitative way. The results show that when people with an ethnic stigma are not informed (properly) about why they have been selected, stopped and searched, and treated as suspects instead of false positives, they feel racially profiled, yet take little or no further action in addition to the complaints.

Migrants who must leave the Netherlands are often detained in Dutch detention centers before their expulsion. Migrant detainees fall under the same criminal laws and authorities as persons incarcerated under Dutch criminal law. This means that migrants can be put in isolation cells, for example for refusing a shared room. This article describes the circumstances in the detention centers, and it makes an analysis of European and Dutch case law on the treatment of migrant detainees, specifically in cases of isolation. Considering articles 3, 5 and 8 ECHR and article 47 of the EU CFR, this is problematic, and access to legal protection seems to be too limited for migrant detainees. The article concludes by stating the necessity for a new legal framework, and for more substantive judicial reviews in cases of the isolation of migrant detainees.

This article deals with the legislative proposal in the Netherlands to criminalise staying (without permission) in an area controlled by a terrorist organisation. The discussion surrounding the proposal is focused, amongst other things, on possible exemptions for journalists and providers of humanitarian assistance. This article analyses the newest version of the proposal in light of the rights to freedom of movement and freedom of expression.

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.