Montaigne Centre Blog


Controversy Sparks in Israel over Fear of Rule of Law and Human Rights Backsliding

Recently, Israeli constitutional law outlined the vulnerability of the Israeli legal system to systematic constitutional threats by the religious right-wing government led by re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This exposes Israel’s legal system to rule of law and human rights backsliding – what is it all about, and why is it happening now? In this blog,…

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Rights of Nature: Just Another Chocolate Laxative?

Scholars, lawyers and activists around the world have recently embraced the idea of granting legal personality and subjective rights to rivers, landscapes and other natural entities. In view of the climate crisis and other environmental problems, such an expansion of legal personhood and rights is widely understood as a revolution that could save the world….

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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? Legislative Reform on the Path to Justice for Victims of Sexual Violence in Indonesia

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Like other countries, Indonesia grapples with violence against women resulting from patriarchal institutions and compounded by gaps in the justice system. The UN Committee monitoring Indonesia’s implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) highlighted this issue as one of the main points of concern in their 2021…

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Legal Aspects of the EncroChat-Operation

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In the EncroChat operation, French law enforcement authorities collected over 120 million messages from 60.000 EncroChat users. They cooperated with Dutch law enforcement authorities and Europol in a Joint Investigation Team (JIT). In the Netherlands, EncroChat data has already been used in over 200 criminal cases. In this blog, we explain how the right to…

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Should we increase greenspace to improve living environments in Dutch prisons?

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There is growing consensus among academics and policy makers that the living environments in Dutch prisons need to be improved. This belief is fuelled by the idea that better living environments will enhance the well-being of both prisoners and prison staff. Also, it will strengthen the effectiveness of the criminal sentencing system, as prisoners who…

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The Big Bang in EU Law, Promises and Empirical Reality

Who knows the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) Van Gend & Loos judgment? Silly question, of course. The judgment has become famous for introducing the direct effect of EU law, allowing individuals to rely directly on EU law provisions against Member States and, sometimes, even against other individuals. But who can tell what the direct…

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Judiciaries Must Build Support in Societies

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The concerted attacks on judicial independence in a range of European countries, especially in Poland and Hungary, draw widespread condemnation internationally but also feelings of frustration: Why does the European Commission not act decisively to block this ‘backsliding’? High expectations turned into disillusionment (Steinbeis 2020). This is of course a vital issue, but the sole…

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