Latest blog articles
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Why it is so challenging for Dutch authorities to effectively implement the government policy against serious drug related organized crime? Recently, my colleagues and I from Maastricht University and Erasmus University Rotterdam published an article in the Dutch Tijdschrift over Cultuur en...
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The debate on the implications of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia recently intensified after a report concluded that the Dutch forces had used extreme violence. Reactions to the report reveal that the issue remains controversial and challenging to discuss. The findings in the report do however...
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Today in times of pandemic hospitals face a crisis of scarce resources. In many places this has already led to measures of triage where critical medical care is rationed to those who are most likely to benefit from it. In other places, it is clear that such measures will soon need to be taken.
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The very recent ruling of the CJEU in DK (C-653/19 PPU, 28 November 2019) came to verify two quite depressing suspicions about the current status of European criminal law. First, Directive 2016/343 on the presumption of innocence remains an instrument with staggeringly limited applicability...
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I wrote my PhD towards the last days of the debate over “social rights”. This debate harkens back to the fifties, when the International Covenant on Social and Cultural Rights was being negotiated. Some claimed that social rights could never be true rights. Others claimed that without social rights...
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25 years after the Genocide Against the Tutsi, the denial of this genocide still poses a serious challenge to prevention and reconciliation. How to address this problem was one of the central questions discussed during a recent commemorative conference in the Peace Palace.
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In this entry I want to mention four considerations that suggest that human rights lawyers should be cautious in embracing basic income as a replacement for human rights. These reflections should be seen as merely exploratory. The basic income in full has never been put in practice, and consequently...
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To speak of economic justice today is to speak of the basic income. A basic income can be defined as an unconditional cash payment to all persons who form part of a political community. As automation increases, there is fear that labor will be replaced by “robots”. The basic income seems to be a...
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It would have been rather uncomfortable for the Court to rule that the Italian limitation periods for serious VAT-fraud cases should be set aside, wouldn't it? Can Taricco II be, after all, just a temporary (and unstable!) bridge over the troubled waters of the EU’s financial interests, soon to be...
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Instead of protecting the victims of Burundi, the current government shields those who are responsible. The problem with such impunity is that it de facto “legalizes” violence as no accountability is created.