Maastricht Institute for Legal Education

Donna Yates (Associate Professor in the Criminal Law and Criminology department) has been appointed UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging Crime.

The Executive Board has appointed Dr Frank Nellen as Professor of Value Added Taxes and Supply Chain Levies as of 1 March 2026. He succeeds Ad van Doesum, who was appointed Justice in the Tax Chamber of the Dutch Supreme Court as of 1 January 2026.

Unique in the Netherlands: some credits from higher professional education in law count directly towards the pre-master's degree.

Dr Marieke Hopman and Guleid Jama are launching a new research project on the role of children in peacebuilding in conflict areas.

The Maastricht Law and Tech Lab, together with the Brightlands Institute for Smart Society (BISS), obtained a € 100.000 a Comenius Senior Teaching Fellow grant.

On 27 and 28 January 2026, the Maastricht Centre for Law & Jurisprudence (MCLJ) organised its second annual conference with a theme inspired by these issues: Law in a Changing World. The conference’s purpose was to tackle key aspects of this changing reality, investigate its causes, and study novel legal methods and moral and political goals. 

On 26 November 2025, M-EPLI welcomed Professor Michele Spanò, Associate Professor in Social Philosophy and Law at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. His talk explored the emergence of legal norms and their operation in modern society though the lens of Evgeny Pašukanis’ 1924 work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. Spanò presented a compelling case for why this nearly century-old text remains crucial for understanding the relationship between law, capitalism, and social transformation.

The Netherlands struggles in its fight against illicit financial activity. Despite its extensive regulatory framework, detection of anomalous financial patterns is no simple task due to the many uncertainties involved. Furthermore, as financial data volumes grow and fraudulent patterns remain partly unknown, traditional monitoring approaches are increasingly unreliable. In this blog, I expand on the major issues, highlighting some weak points and suggesting improvements through my research.

Tracing and confiscating criminal assets is an essential part of the fight against organised crime, because it provides better insight into the financial logistics of criminal operations and "hits criminals where it really hurts: in their wallets." However, the challenges posed by cross-border cooperation in the field of financial investigations complicate the fight against serious forms of crime. Research into cross-border police cooperation and the challenges associated with it is however relatively scarce. Moreover, this type of research often focuses on classic forms of police and judicial cooperation and tends to ignore financial aspects of crime. To fill this gap, the study "Cross-border Financial Police Investigations" has been started.

These last few weeks, Minister Paul of Social Affairs and Employment of the outgoing cabinet has been in the news for unilaterally deciding no longer to gradually phase out the Dutch regulation that allows temporary employment agencies to deduct a quarter of the minimum wage from migrant workers salaries in exchange for housing. That regulation would decrease by 5 percent starting January 1st, reaching 0 percent by New Year's Day 2030. Paul's predecessor, Van Hijum, intended to introduce this legislation to combat human trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation involving temporary employment agencies by making migrant workers less dependent onthem. Human traffickers often make migrant workers and other vulnerable populations multiply dependent on them by requiring them not only to work for them but also be housed by them. Once a worker loses their job, they no longer have a place to stay overnight.