Latest blog articles
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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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Questions surrounding how the EU budget is spent or audited have been, and will always be, of interest to EU citizens. Formally, the responsibility for the implementation of the budget rests with the Commission, but it is well known that the Member States have a crucial role to play, especially in...
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Although the delta variant is currently leading to a sharp increase in the number of positive Covid 19 tests, hospital admissions are fortunately still low. Let's hope it stays this way and that with the growing number of vaccinations we slowly move in the right direction with Covid 19 in Europe. If...
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On 4 March 2021, Italy decided to block a shipment of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine that was destined for Australia. This remarkable move, notably made in response to AstraZeneca’s delay in providing the agreed doses of vaccines by the set deadlines, is the first of its kind since the...
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About a year ago, this blog published my contribution “Let us not forget about EU fundamental rights,” which addressed the situation at the EU’s external borders. At the time, the decision of the ECtHR in the case of N.D and N.T v. Spain, was heavily criticised for failing to protect the right to...
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In the fall of last year, the Dutch Raad voor Cultuur has issued an advice on how the Dutch government and Dutch museums (and the broader public in the Netherlands in general) should deal with the continuing presence of colonial-era heritage in Dutch museum collections. The report constitutes a...
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It is most appropriate that a classroom in our Faculty of Law at University Maastricht has been named after someone who was a legal legend in his own country (Nigeria) and was the first legal luminary of exceptional quality in the African world: Judge Taslim Olawale Elias.
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities” (Voltaire). When reading about the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide it is difficult to understand how such events could ever have taken place. How can a society turn on a particular group and send them to death camps? How...
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After an exhausting few months in the ‘COVID-19 era’—as we can call it now—after months of hard work and the stress of dealing with a pandemic, everybody is looking to take a break during the summer. But unlike in recent years when we could plan our summer vacation months in advance, this year it...
