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…

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…

Between 22 and 24 June 2020, the 6th Biennial Conference of the European Society of Comparative Legal History took place at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. The conference focused on the history of methods of legal professionals across Europe and the world. As judges, lawyers and other legal professions have developed differently from country to…

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…

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…

On 25 October 2020, Chile made a crucial step towards the introduction of a new, democratically elaborated Constitution which, if all goes well, will replace the 40 year old charter that General Pinochet’s authoritarian regime imposed on the country. On that day in October, almost 80 per cent of the voters approved in a referendum…

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…

In his book ‘Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy’, Brian Christopher Jones describes constitutional idolatry as ‘drastically or persistently over-selling the importance and effects of written constitutions’.  For a scholar trained in Dutch constitutional law this is a rather foreign concept. Although the Dutch Constitution (hereafter: Constitution) is one of the oldest in the world, the Netherlands is…

Early 2020, the European Commission recognized in the preamble of its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence that AI ‘entails a number of potential risks’ including ‘gender-based or other kinds of discrimination’. It therefore deemed ‘important to assess whether [EU law] can be enforced adequately to address the risks that AI systems create, or whether adjustments…

On 10 September 2020, ransomware infected 30 servers at University Hospital Düsseldorf, crashing systems and forcing the hospital to turn away emergency patients. As a result, German authorities stated, a woman in a life-threatening condition was sent to a hospital 20 miles away in Wuppertal and died from treatment delays. On 28 September, another alarming news article stated that ‘a…