Tijdens de zomermaanden oordeelde het Europees Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens over twee verzoekschriften waarin de vrijheid van meningsuiting van werknemers centraal stond. De eerste zaak (Heinisch/ Duitsland) betrof naar de woorden van het Hof een zaak van whistle-blowing (klokkenluiders). Een werkneemster maakte van haar vrijheid van meningsuiting gebruik om extern wantoestanden in de onderneming aan te klagen die een kwestie van algemeen belang raken. In de tweede zaak (Sanchez e.a./Spanje) onderzocht een Grote Kamer het ontslag op staande voet van enkele vakbondsleden wegens een naar de mening van de werkgever diffamerende cartoon in een interne vakbondspublicatie. Deze cartoon hield verband met een juridisch geschil tussen de vakbond en de werkgever dat in de Spaanse rechtbanken werd uitgevochten. In deze zaak wordt ook aan de vakverenigingsvrijheid getoetst. Een onderliggende vergelijking van beide zaken laat toe te appreciëren of werknemers in de uitoefening van een vertegenwoordigend mandaat dat zij van aangesloten vakbondsleden hebben gekregen, over een grotere dan wel een kleinere expressievrijheid beschikken dan geïsoleerde werknemers die ‘onrecht’ aanklagen. De relevantie van de aard van de ondernemingsactiviteit (publieke of private sector) en de arbeidsverhouding (ambtenaar/contractueel) wordt bekeken. Na een afzonderlijke analyse van beide zaken, een beschouwing over de tussenkomst van de vakbond in de zaak Heinisch en een beschouwing over de formele methodologie van het Hof worden beide arresten vanuit enkele kernvragen rond expressievrijheid op de werkplek op een meer vergelijkende wijze beschouwd.

‘Pompen of verzuipen? Bestuurder in de gevarenzone: ken uw getallen’ is een bewerking van een paper van de auteurs geschreven ten behoeve van de Insolad-cursus ‘Financiële economie voor curatoren’. Onderzocht is of bedrijfseconomische indicatoren handvatten kunnen bieden voor het te voeren beleid van noodlijdende ondernemingen. De auteurs concluderen dat bestuurders zich onvoldoende bewust zijn van het nut van het besturen van de onderneming aan de hand van actuele managementinformatie, die hen in staat kan stellen feitelijke insolventie te voorkomen en tijdig te reorganiseren. Bepleit wordt een wettelijk systeem waarbij de bestuurder door periodieke registraties wordt gedwongen elementaire managementinformatie beschikbaar te hebben, bij gebreke waarvan bij faillissement een wettelijk vermoeden van onbehoorlijke taakvervulling ontstaat.

Bij de onderzoeken naar de oorzaken van de financiële crisis werd ook de rol van Corporate Governance onder de loep genomen. Dit is aanleiding geweest voor de publicatie door de Europese Commissie van twee Groenboeken over respectievelijk Corporate Governance bij financiële instellingen en beloningsbeleid en de Europese Corporate Governance-structuur. Hierbij worden impliciet veel voorstellen voor nieuwe Corporate Governance-regels gedaan. In deze bijdrage wordt een aantal van deze voorstellen getoetst aan het subsidiariteitsbeginsel en het proportionaliteitsbeginsel die in art. 5 leden 3 en 4 TEU zijn vastgelegd en in de literatuur zijn uitgewerkt. Hierbij wordt ook bekeken of regulering van Corporate Governance-onderwerpen op EU-niveau ingaat tegen nationale voorkeuren in de vennootschappelijke regelgeving en dit gerechtvaardigd wordt door de noodzaak tot ingrijpen door de EU. Geconcludeerd wordt dat bij ‘gewone’ vennootschappen terughoudendheid moet worden betracht bij het invoeren van inhoudelijke aanvullende Corporate Governance-regels. Bij financiële instellingen is regulering op EU-niveau gewenst omdat aannemelijk is dat een falende Corporate Governance bij deze instellingen heeft bijgedragen aan de financiële crisis en een bedreiging vormt voor het Europese financiële systeem.

During the Second World War, a large number of prisoners were put to work in concentration camps in order to contribute to the development of Germany. As this labour became more important in economic terms during the years 1939 to 1945, the death toll in the camps also rose during the same period. This contribution aims at providing insight into the apparent contradiction (paradox) between the practices of extermination on the one hand and the German economic interests on the other hand. Not only has historiography paid relatively little attention to this phenomenon (it is not a main topic), criminology has also remained remarkably silent during this debate. Looking at the ‘plantation’ in Dachau concentration camp (1937-1945) we develop an exploratory analysis of the subject. Using Vaughan’s organizational criminology, we discuss the paradox and address the question of the extent to which criminology can offer explanations for phenomena of this kind.

What do we know about the criminological aspects of international crimes? What do they entail and what are facilitating factors which can help us understand their causes and how should we respond to these crimes? Are international crimes merely a more extreme form of ordinary crimes or are they a different kind of criminality? In the past few years a growing number of scholars both at a national and at an international level have devoted their scholarly attention to this important and urgent research theme. In this special issue we aim to present a number of articles in which different perspectives on this topic are presented. By doing so we hope to enhance our knowledge of this phenomenon and to provide an impulse to further criminological research within this area in both the Netherlands and Belgium. This introductory article gives an overview of the state of the art of international crime criminology in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the rest of the world.

During the 1990s the Serbian government entered into a symbiotic relationship with criminals and paramilitary units which led to a normalization of crime and violence. While society usually inhibits people from criminal behavior, in Serbia this process was reversed. Propaganda contained the neutralization techniques that allowed people to condone and even approve of violent and criminal behavior. The reversal of the moral order became part of Serbia’s popular culture in which criminals who had committed many atrocities during the war, like Arkan, were honored. In this way, Arkan served not only a military and strategic purpose but also a political one, by generating support for the war.

One of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘loverboys’ is their exploitation of victims in any possible way, including forcing these exploited women to commit crimes. In this way, victims become criminal offenders. After a critical review of the use of the term ‘loverboy’, the first part of this article discusses the responsibility of the Dutch probation service in addressing the problem. The second part describes various ways in which probation officers come into contact with this particular group of offenders and how this contact could then be maintained.

This paper deals with the question of how a partly privatized security sector could be regulated. A central aim of this regulation should be the control of security as a public good. Three models of regulation are analyzed. The current practice of this regulation in the Netherlands shows a serious lack of effectiveness. One of our main conclusions is that neither the state nor the private sector is able to enforce this regulation on their own. However, it is assumed that the state should have a central and integrated regulatory role in this field, with more attention paid to the practical implementation of it, with the power and will to sanction private agencies if necessary. In addition managers of private security companies should adopt a role as public managers with a public moral duty. Regulation of security is faced with a double problematic, not only the horizontal fragmentation of the field, but also the vertical fragmentation, often resulting in a serious gap between managers and those in the field, both in the public and the private sector. This implies that the regulation should not only rest on the state and on self-regulation by the sector at management level, but also on the promotion of a practical ethic for security workers to steer and regulate their daily work.

De auteur tracht in het artikel aan te tonen dat het leerstuk van de onvoorziene omstandigheden een kwestie van uitleg is, en dat uitleg al jaar en dag een kwestie van normatief uitleggen is, alias redelijke uitleg, uitleg te goeder trouw. Dat alles in het licht van het al omvattende beginsel van de redelijkheid en billijkheid.

Bij het vaststellen van hetgeen partijen over en weer aan elkaar verplicht zijn dient niet slechts acht geslagen te worden op de bewoordingen van relevante contractuele bepalingen maar op het geheel van normen dat in de gegeven rechtsverhouding van toepassing is. Om dit dynamische begrip van uitleg aan te duiden is gekozen voor de aan het Engelse recht ontleende term ‘constructie’. Objectieve interpretatie houdt naar Engels recht in het vaststellen van de betekenis van bewoordingen zoals een reasonable (business) person deze opgevat zou hebben. Het gaat er bij uitleg om op zorgvuldige wijze te bewerkstellingen dat partijen hun beloften nakomen.

In transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases, spouses can come into contact with two different legal systems. Many different kinds of organisations are involved, offering social and legal advice and aid in these transnational divorces: advising and referring clients, educating spouses and professionals, and influencing policy. In this article these organisations are analysed as participants in a transnational field of legal aid, using Moore’s concept of the semi-autonomous social field. It becomes clear that these organisations share norms on transnational divorce: they frame transnational divorce as a women’s problem, and one of complex, interacting rules and regulations. These norms form the source of rules on how to handle law in transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases.

In order to establish and evaluate the significance of changing socio-legal boundaries and how these are mirrored in citizenship, cross-border formations of the social and citizenship rules must be discussed. The first part of this paper deals with changes in social boundaries across state borders and presents three generations of transnational studies. Based on this, the second part asks how legal boundaries have changed in the case of dual citizenship and supranational social citizenship. Citizenship is a particularly important issue because it sits at the intersection of social and legal boundaries. There is a growing tolerance toward dual citizenship and the evolution of supranational citizenship, one in which migrants enjoy a transnational life that is supported by the implementation of human rights principles in national constitutions, legislation and in European Union court rulings.

In recent years, West European supermarkets have been playing an active role in the global regulation of food safety. They have developed several transnational food safety standards and compelled suppliers of food products around the world to acquire certification under these standards. Why and how did supermarkets do this? This article explores the emergence and evolution of transnational supermarket standards by analyzing the development of GlobalGAP, one of the most commonly implemented supermarket standards on farms throughout the world. In the literature, the emergence of transnational regulation is often attributed to one or two factors that play an important role at a particular moment in time. The main argument made in this article is that the emergence of transnational supermarket standards is best understood when it is studied as a process. The development of GlobalGAP includes four main characteristics which may be helpful in analyzing the emergence of other transnational private standards.

This paper presents a reflection on the theoretical work on the social working of law of the past two decades. It is argued that early assumptions, that legal models were becoming increasingly globalised, creating an increasingly uniform body of law, have not come true. The global spread of neo-capitalism has not only given rise to de-juridification, it has also engendered juridification in which ever more sectors of social life, from small scale to global, are being colonised by law. This development is initiated from above and below in equal measure, and concerns not only the law of nation states, but also law created by other actors, including religious law of various provenance. The paper argues that great progress has been made in understanding how transnational law is generated and how law is transnationalised, but that the ways in which these processes work when actors actually use this transnationalised law in contexts of legal pluralism are not yet adequately understood. The paper presents a perspective on transnationalisation of law that is grounded in space, a perspective that may aid our understanding of the social working of law in transnational contexts. The first section provides a brief survey of some of the main academic approaches to processes of transnationalisation. The second section addresses the issue of location and considers what happens in settings where actors use transnationalising law. The conclusions discuss the value of transnational space and transnational legal space as concepts for the analysis of transnationalising law.

Transnationalism and migration are recognised contributors to legal pluralism. Scholars of legal pluralism state that in conflicts, social actors sustain their claims with arguments from coexisting legal systems. They manoeuvre between different legal systems, or contradicting norms within one system, to achieve the most satisfactory decision in a conflict. In doing so, they use norms as discursive tools. Indeed, according to data on domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, this manoeuvring with norms as discursive tools is often recognisable in conflicts between workers and their employers. However, transnational contractual norms and the legal pluralism they create are not merely discursive tools in existing conflicts; they are also regularly the cause of conflicts. Domestic workers conclude agreements with agents in their countries of origin, while employers conclude agreements with different agents in the destination countries. Both parties believe the other party has signed the same contract, while in reality that is not the case. Because of the differences between the two sets of contractual norms, these norms cause conflicts; they are not merely discursive tools. This finding calls for a division between different types of conflicts, which is proposed here for the purpose of socio-legal analysis of conflicts in general and particularly in situations of transnationalism and legal pluralism.

For a common market, a common patent and a common patent litigation seem self-evident. Although efforts to introduce these common market institutions in Europe started early in the history of the Economic Community, they remained unsuccessful. The reconstruction of this legal history is focused on two theoretical issues.The first concerns the question of power and influence in the EU, in particular the configuration of stakeholders responsible for the non-decision making on this policy issue. The basic mechanism underlying the lack of success of this dossier appears to be a balance of power between the two opposing groups of stakeholders (France and European institutions vs. Germany, UK, supported by their patenting industry and legal experts). This suggests that transnational rule making, proceeding under similar conditions, is likely to have a long (if not unsuccessful) ‘issue career’.The second theoretical issue concerns the agenda-setting mechanisms of recent decades. All initiatives on international or transnational patent policy have mainly been the product of ‘high politics’, although the input of patent legal experts (representatives of ‘low politics’) has increased considerably in recent decades. Further, this history would seem to defy simple schemes of agenda setting. There is no simple sequence of issue initiation, specification, expansion and entrance. At best, it is a series of such sequences.

From an international point of view the double hybrid nature of ‘med-arb’ – imagined as a ‘guarantee’ for a ‘prompt’ resolution of business disputes – is out on a limb. The contractually planned transition from a failed mediation towards the ascertainment of procedural fairness in the subsequent arbitration under the guidance of the same Neutral poses indeed delicate questions.Not more than two – by the way federally ruled – countries – the USA and Australia – have endeavored – in some of their States – to tackle the problems related to confidentiality which determine the viability of ‘med-arb’ (beside the basic behavioral problem of negotiating with the assistance of a Neutral who unexpectedly may become your arbitrator). The validity of the – domestic – solutions devised in the USA and Australia is subject to caution in the light of the 1958 New York Convention on the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards.

This contribution examines how the Directive 2008/52/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2008 on certain aspects of mediation in civil and commercial matters is transposed in various member states of the European Union, or how the discussion about the transposition is conducted or is still ongoing in some countries. The following seven countries are examined: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, England, France, Germany and Austria.