News

Professor Bruno de Witte is saying goodbye to Maastricht University, but not to European Law. He will continue to deliver his razor-sharp legal analyses at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. 

They can do it already: deliver pizzas and medicines, inspect windows for cleanliness, monitor crowds. And all that autonomously, without a human driver. But how do you ensure that drones comply with laws and regulations? Professor of Private Law and technology expert Gijs van Dijck translates legal rules such that drones can understand and implement them.

After years of meaningful work at our university, Prof. Fons Coomans gave his farewell address to the Faculty of Law on 2 September, where he examined important human rights questions. How do they impact our daily lives? And how do they affect people on a personal level? Will future generations still have human rights?

Hannah Brodersen, currently working as a postdoc at the Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland), was awarded the Prize for her Doctoral thesis ‘Longer than life: How the ICTY strengthened the rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia’.

It could come straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian movie A Clockwork Orange: using direct brain stimulation to reduce aggressive behaviour. For PhD student Ruben Knehans, it’s his daily business. Aside from the medical complexity, it raises all sorts of questions. Is it ethical, for example, to modify someone's behaviour? Can you justify imposing brain stimulation on convicts under criminal law? How to set rules and standards? Ruben tries to answer these questions in his PhD research at UM’s Faculty of Law.

Professor Kai Jonas is the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience’s first chair of “Applied Social Psychology with special focus on LGBTQI+ Diversity and Health”. In the run-up to his inaugural lecture, he reflects on difficult conversations, progress, and how he uses psychology to tackle the still very relevant challenge of HIV.

Although several measures have been taken in recent years to solve problems in cross-border employment, harmonisation of tax and social security systems between countries is still a bridge too far, Professor Marjon Weerepas stated in her inaugural speech entitled 'Border workers: coordinating, not because it is not possible, but because it is necessary'. 

The destruction of cultural property by the Islamic State in Mosul and Palmyra: is International Law the answer?’, is the title of Alessandra Silva’s bachelor’s thesis. During the Dies celebration last February, the 23-year-old Italian received the thesis prize, as one of seventeen winners, for the best bachelor's thesis in 2016.

This week the news reached FPN that the application for a grant has been approved for the project Improvement of fact finding in child abuse cases at Veilig Thuis: Implementation and evaluation of the NICHD protocol compared to current practices.

Last week Dr. Benedikt Poser of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience (CN) at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience (FPN) received word from the NWO (Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research) that his team received the NWO Investment Subsidy Medium grant (MaGW) from the NWO’s division of Social Sciences and Humanities.