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Based on multi-sited archival research, this article examines the racialized regulation of commercial sex in 1970s France, and whether and how this was intertwined with the protection of a racialized, gendered, and class-based sexual order. In doing so, this article contributes to a contextualized and historicized analysis of the construction of race and colour-blindness in French legislation and law enforcement. During and after the Algerian War, colonial anxieties about sexual threats posed by North African male labour migrants in the French metropole played a role in the discussion on commercial sex and motivated politicians, policymakers and journalists to argue for its selective tolerance. The author argues that the indirect legislation on commercial sex granted discretionary power to the police to protect the sexual order through colourblind justifications. This enabled law enforcement to implement and enforce universalist legislation ‘from below’ in a racially particularistic way.

This study discusses the European Union’s proposal for a Regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets, now subject to formal approval by the European Parliament. The objective is to explore whether it will positively impact the adoption of crypto-assets in the financial sector. The use of crypto-assets is growing. However, some stakeholders in the financial service sector remain skeptical and hesitant to adopt assets that are yet to be defined and have an unclear legal status. This regulatory uncertainty has been identified as the primary reason for the reluctant adoption. The proposed regulation (part of the EU’s Digital Finance Strategy) aims to provide this legal certainty for currently unregulated crypto-assets. This study investigates whether or not the proposed regulation can be expected to have the intended effect by reviewing the proposed regulation itself, the opinions and reactions of the various stakeholders, and secondary literature. Findings reveal that such regulation will most likely not accelerate the adoption of crypto-assets in the EU financial services sector, at least not sufficiently or as intended. Some suggestions are made to improve the proposal.

Drawing on the neo-republican theory of non-domination and a qualitative case study conducted in three Dutch municipalities, this article explores the extent to which external rules are able to prevent arbitrary power in relationships between welfare officers and work supervisors, on the one hand, and welfare recipients participating in mandatory work programmes, on the other hand. It concludes that external rules were insufficiently implemented in the three municipalities in question. In addition, it found that rules cease to be capable of constraining arbitrary power where institutional contexts themselves are unpredictable and insecure. Under these conditions, welfare recipients may seek to avoid risks and act in accordance with the preferences (or their expectation of the preferences) of the welfare officer or work supervisor by playing the role of the ‘good recipient’ instead of relying on available rules of a protective nature or rules that enable them to have a say in their participation in mandatory work programmes.

The combat against the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium led to the adoption of several measures that impacted the freedom of religion or belief. The particular focus of this article is the collective exercise of religion in places of worship and its protection by judicial actors during the first two years of the COVID-19 crisis. This choice was prompted by the fact that the government measures taken in this context had significant consequences for this form of religious manifestation...

The decision to remand a defendant into custody pre-trial is one of the most controversial criminal justice decisions because it deprives individuals of their liberty while they are presumed to be innocent of a crime. Indeed, pre-trial detention decisions can have significant consequences for defendants, which need to be balanced against the potential implications of bail for public safety and the course of criminal proceedings. Despite this, court-based bail and remand decision-making remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we compare court-based bail/remand decision-making in England and Wales and The Netherlands. We focus on (i) the procedure and structure of decision-making, (ii) the substantive relevant legal frameworks, (iii) the courts in which the decisions are made and the decision-makers in those courts, (iv) the conditions characterizing the decision task, and (v) the court’s reasoning of bail and remand in custody decisions. Using a comparative and multi-disciplinary approach, relying on Law, Criminology, and Psychology, we make predictions about bail and remand in custody rates in the two jurisdictions as well as the decision performance of court-based decision-makers. These predictions are then evaluated using available (official) statistics and past research. We identify the need to collect more nuanced statistical data on bail and remand in custody rates and point to potentially fruitful avenues for future research. A comparative, multi-disciplinary, evidence-based approach can underpin remand reform in England and Wales, The Netherlands, and beyond.

This article analyses the consistency between the implementation of the EU Youth Guarantee and the fundamental right to work. Focusing on the use of traineeships as an implementation instrument, it explores various types of national Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) for young unemployed people in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland. The case studies show that it remains to be seen whether the traineeships considered in this research comply with the right to work. The authors argue for the need to strengthen the Youth Guarantee to accord with the right to work, so that in addition to the right to a first job, it ensures that work-related instruments include the provision of effective training, as well as the right to equal pay for work of equal value, and decent working conditions. This is particularly important in view of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, that has had an unprecedented economic impact in the EU and is likely to result in another dramatic upsurge in the number of young unemployed. Youth Guarantee, Right to Work, NEETs, Traineeships, Decent Work, Equal Pay, Active Labour Market Policies

The Belgian Constitution holds an obligation for governmental schools to organise RE in the recognised religions and in non-confessional ethics for all children of school age. While neither the Flemish nor the French Community legislator can thus abandon RE altogether, both legislators have recently taken initiatives, moving beyond the opt-out system, towards an opt-in system and a partial withdrawal of RE in governmental schools. After a brief description of the Belgian RE system and its historical roots, we scrutinise these evolutions. Although the Constitution does offer some room for manoeuvring, not everything goes: ending the possibility for students in governmental schools to opt for RE in any of the recognised religions or in non-denominational ethics altogether would, for instance, not be allowed. This is different from the perspective of human rights instruments such as the ECtHR, which permits, but does not require governmental schools to organise moral or religious education. Following the margin of appreciation doctrine of the ECtHR, the ECHR does not pose strict limits on governmental possibilities. It remains, however, to be seen whether the Flemish and French Community will manage to stay in line with the stricter regime of the Belgian Constitution.

This contribution questions the conception of normative theory that Martijn Hesselink seems to embrace in Justifying Contract in Europe. The question it asks is ostensibly simple and straightforward: what is normative theory? And: what does Hesselink mean when he speaks of normative theory? By connecting the method and approach of Justifying Contract in Europe to the question of delimitation, the article raises several concerns with the reasons Hesselink offers for excluding feminist and Marxist theory, including their heterogeneity and presumed hostility to normative questions and approaches. The article suggests that these reasons point to a broader and more profound difficulty with Hesselink’s understanding of normative theory, which rests on a problematic distinction between normativity and critique. To this, the article responds that critique and normativity (moral philosophy), properly understood, are intimately related – in fact: inseparable – and that one without the other leaves us with a significantly impoverished and unduly narrow understanding of both normativity and critique.

Net-zero targets play an important role in public and private climate governance. The concept of net zero implies that emissions can be outbalanced by compensatory activities such as greenhouse gas removals and offsetting. However, emissions and compensation measures are not equivalent in terms of their climate impact. The climate benefits of currently available compensation practices are more uncertain and less permanent than the harm caused by emissions. From a legal perspective, two problems can be observed. First, aggregating emissions and non-equivalent compensation measures may violate the requirement that greenhouse gas inventories should be accurate. Second, it may conflict with the principle that only effective mitigation measures should count towards emission reduction targets.

Daniel Joyce’s book is more than a publication. It is a testimony to courage. When he started this book project, I had a few brief chats with the author. He harboured doubts, as some experienced scholars in the field had given him free advice: do not take up such a vague and undefined topic. International law is about sources and rules and their application; not about media and public communication. The author wisely decided to ignore this free advice, to follow his own intuition and curiosity instead. The result is the topic of this symposium: Informed Publics, Media and International Law, a remarkable and important book...

The Peace Palace in The Hague is more than a mere venue where international law is practiced. Initiated after the 1899 Peace Conference it provided a material home for the emergent international community and as such, we argue, helped to sing this community into existence. This article traces the process of materialising the grand international ideal of ‘peace through justice’ by shedding light on its bureaucratic backstage of transnational diplomacy. Taking a ritual perspective on gift-giving as a way to constitute relationships, we analyse how three sets of gifts were crucial to (the) building (of) the emergent international community: finding a proper site (as a gift from the Dutch government), securing Andrew Carnegie’s financial gift, and collecting materials and artworks donated by the States as gifts to the Palace. We examine how each of these arrangements involved a complex web of public and private transnational actors, temporalities, and bickering over nitty gritty details as the conditions of possibility for giving and receiving gifts, and constituting the international community.

The disproportionate use of remand detention (i.e. pre-trial detention) for vulnerable and marginalized youth is an issue of concern globally and demographic disparities in youth remand decision outcomes have been found in many jurisdictions, including England and the Netherlands. This article aims to explore and identify potential catalysts of disparity in the collective process of remand decision-making in youth courts. Drawing from Ulmer’s ‘inhabited institutions’ perspective, and the related ‘court community model’ and ‘focal concerns model’, and empirical findings from research in Dutch and English youth remand courts, this article suggests that several distinctive mechanisms and features of the youth remand decision-making process might function as catalysts of disparity. The findings indicate that the focus on ‘risk’ and ‘welfare needs’, the distinctive context defined by time constraints, limited information, shortages of readily available services, interdependency and interdisciplinary, and high stakes, combined with the profoundly human nature of courtroom workgroup decision-making, make the remand decision-making process in youth courts particularly prone to producing unwarranted disparities. Ultimately, informed by the theoretical perspectives and empirical findings, the article provides insights into how and why disparities might occur in youth remand decisions and offers suggestions for policy, practice and future research.

Purpose The authors investigate whether the individual “completion contributions” that enable online crowdfunding campaigns to meet or exceed their targets tend to be larger in relative terms when made nearer to the funding deadline. As these contributions are likely to have a disproportionate impact upon campaign outcomes, the authors assess whether the investment patterns they observe are consistent with the theory of impact philanthropy.Design/methodology/approach The authors use campaign-level data incorporating observations on campaigns from reward (both all-or-nothing, AoN and keep-it-all, KiA), donation and equity-based platforms. To the knowledge of the authors, the coverage of the data is unparalleled elsewhere in the crowdfunding literature. Using these data, the authors analyze whether completion contributions tend to vary contingent upon both the proximity of the deadline and form of crowdfunding.Findings The authors find that completion contributions tend to vary significantly and positively with proximity to funding deadlines. The authors also find that this relationship tends to be more pronounced among AoN than for KiA campaigns, as well as for donation-based platforms compared with equity-based platforms. Altogether, the patterns of behavior observed are consistent with the theory of impact philanthropy.Originality/valueThe authors help develop a better understanding of the behaviors of contributors to online crowdfunding campaigns and whether those behaviors are consistent with altruistic motivations. The findings also have considerable value in understanding the non-financial factors associated with the informal financing of business startups.

Bulkbevoegdheden, zoals bulkinterceptie van communicatie en bulk-hacking, worden steeds vaker gebruikt, niet alleen in zaken van nationale veiligheid, maar ook in strafrechtelijke onderzoeken naar zware criminaliteit. De EncroChat-hack is daar een recent voorbeeld van. De vraag die echter nog moet worden beantwoord is: hoe moeten deze bevoegdheden die tot grootschalige data-analyse in strafrechtelijke onderzoeken leiden worden genormeerd zodat zij in overeenstemming zijn met artikel 8 EVRM? Twee recente arresten van het EHRM met betrekking tot bulkinterceptie bieden enkele lessen. Zij laten zien dat bulkbevoegdheden moeten worden beschouwd als een proces dat ‘end-to-end-waarborgen’ vereist en een gedetailleerde regulering van alle verwerkingsfasen: te weten de verzameling, de selectie, de analyse en het gebruik (waaronder het delen) van de data.

The data retention discussion in the EU is becoming ever more complex. In La Quadrature du Net and others and Privacy International, the CJEU applied its data retention standards to a wide variety of new facts, including data retention, transmission, and automated analysis, both for law enforcement and national security goals. Moreover, the CJEU identified a diverse range of situations in which EU law permits data retention and similar measures on a general and indiscriminate basis. The two judgments provide new opportunities for large scale data retention but raise novel questions about the scope of EU law over national security issues, and the CJEU’s reasoning is too brief in some respects.

The free movement protocols of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have never been fully implemented, yet within the region people have continued to move relatively freely. At the same time, the original aim to improve mobility appears to be changing to one of control over mobility. Drawing on fieldwork data as well as a collaborative, deliberative process of uncovering what free movement means in conversations with a group of West African scholars and activists, this article seeks to better understand free movement in the region, despite all its paradoxes. It shows how formal free movement is undermined by several regional and national impediments, including weak ECOWAS institutions, divergent national interests among individual member states and infrastructural challenges like accessing ID cards, as well as external influence from the EU. These however work in convergence with a practice of everyday mobility within socio-political spaces that cross borders.

Over the past decade, the creative and cultural industries (CCI) have embraced Direct-to-Fan (D2F) crowdfunding as a new and innovative mechanism to finance their independent creative endeavours. We analyse a private dataset of crowdfunding campaigns, comprising ex-ante community metrics and rich qualitative measures to determine how the social ties embedded within multiple coexisting online creator-fan communication channels impact the conversion of fans into campaign funders. Using a combination of negative binomial and logistic regressions, we find evidence of a clear hierarchy of importance of online communication channels, with email representing the most effective medium, followed by Facebook, and Twitter is the least important. This finding both supports the contention that stronger social ties are better relied upon for financial support, and shines a light on the importance of email, an otherwise under-considered factor in crowdfunding performance. A quantile regression analysis further demonstrates that the importance of social ties maintained through email tends to be relatively greater among better-performing campaigns, while for poorly performing campaigns the importance of the length of the written campaign description is greater. We conclude by offering several thoughts on how CCI creators can manage their online fan networks to develop stronger social ties and thus maximise the results of future D2F activities.

Complexity science permeates the policy spectrum but not antitrust. This is unfortunate. Complexity science provides a high-resolution screen on the empirical realities of markets. And it enables a rich understanding of competition, beyond the reductionist descriptions of markets and firms proposed by neoclassical models and their contemporary neo-Brandeisian critique. New insights arise from the key teachings of complexity science, like feedback loops and the role of uncertainty. The present article lays down the building blocks of a complexity-minded antitrust method.

Computer-based communication (CBC) has become an inevitable aspect of our communication infrastructure and a lasting alternative to face-to-face conversations. Yet, CBC (e.g. video conferencing) is not common practice for victim-offender mediation (VOM). Based on eighteen semi-structured interviews with adult victims, offenders and mediators, we provide a heuristic assessment of CBC applicability in VOM. Interviewees associated CBC with higher environmental safety compared to face-to-face mediation, and with richer emotional information compared to indirect VOM (e.g., letter exchange). Risks comprised technical and privacy concerns. Our findings provide insight into stakeholder perceptions of the usability of CBC-VOM and thus directions for effective employment.

Few would disagree that AI systems and applications need to be “responsible,” but what is “responsible” and how to answer that question? Answering that question requires a normative perspective on the role of journalistic AI and the values it shall serve. Such a perspective needs to be grounded in a broader normative framework and a thorough understanding of the dynamics and complexities of journalistic AI at the level of people, newsrooms and media markets. This special issue aims to develop such a normative perspective on the use of AI-driven tools in journalism and the role of digital journalism studies in advancing that perspective. The contributions in this special issue combine conceptual, organisational and empirical angles to study the challenges involved in actively using AI to promote editorial values, the powers at play, the role of economic and regulatory conditions, and ways of bridging academic ideals and the messy reality of the real world. This editorial brings the different contributions into conversation, situates them in the broader digital journalism studies scholarship and identifies seven key-take aways.

Whether and how the GCM will impact national migration orders depends crucially on whether and how both governments and non-state actors engage with it in practice. This article takes Morocco as a case study and focuses on the role of the government and civil society. It asks how far their practices regarding the GCM support its potential as a soft law instrument to impact national migration orders. To undertake a more fine-grained analysis, the article includes an analysis of the implementation of Objective 15 (provision of basic services) as a test case. The paper draws on government reports, civil society reports and semi-structured interviews with policy makers and members of civil society. It identifies good conditions for the GCM to have an impact, in particular Moroccan claimed leadership in migration affaires in Africa; its engagement with the GCM’s review mechanism, and its reliance on the GCM to legitimise migration policies even if some of those policies, as shown by the test case regarding objective 15, are not fully in conformity with the GCM. As to the role of civil society, its impact on the implementation of the GCM is hampered by the sceptical view of most non-governmental organization regarding the GCM. The majority of civil society considers the GCM’s content very problematic and even if a small number of NGOs is positive about (parts of) it, not all of them invoke the GCM in their daily work. The test case regarding Objective 15 shows that NGOs monitoring access to services do not rely on this Objective. Combined with the lack of formal involvement in the national review process, civil society actors are so far unable (or unwilling) to exploit the political potential of the GCM.

In the EU processing of personal data is subject to strict regulations that are laid out in the GDPR. The GDPR definition of personal data is: any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. Hence, if the definition applies, that data falls under the realm of the GDPR. If data is anonymised however, and as such does not constitute ‘personal data’, GDPR regulations are not applicable. This makes the definition of personal data very important. Or better yet, determining when, according to the GDPR, data should be seen as personal data. This approach of the GDPR, where data is either in scope of the regulation or not, can be considered a binary or ‘black and white’ approach to the applicability of the Regulation. This article describes the advances in technology of the big data era and how these advances make it impossible to adequately make the distinction between data and personal data. It focusses on the definition of personal data and discusses the shortcomings of the binary approach. Specific attention is paid to recital 26 GDPR, which provides some guidance to determine whether a natural person is identifiable. The difficulty of the binary approach in the definition of personal data is presented against the background of the technological developments of the last decades and in the years to come (the big data era), as these development challenge the adequate demarcation of personal data even further and demand for a better approach. The article concludes with reflections on what will be a sustainable approach for the demarcation of the scope of data protection and as such a maintainable and preferable basis for privacy protection in the future. A risk based approach is suggested in which different degrees of re-identifiability are recognized, as opposed as a too simplistic binary approach.

In recent years, a platform economy has emerged that is dominated by undertakings such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. They have established a form of private governance vis-à-vis their consumers and customers by means of standard terms that create a risk of exploitation. This trend clashes with the internal market effort of the EU that is predicated on consumer rights and fair competition to address market failures such as market power, information asymmetry, and asymmetrical contractual dependency. In this article we examine how the resulting tensions can be addressed by means of EU competition and contract law. This is based on enforcing fairness by requiring (1) the implementation of proportionality—balancing interests—and (2) respect of the duty of care, in the sense of compliance by design. Jointly this can be seen as an expression of accountability that needs to be made explicit. Apart from pre-existing case law and legislation, we take into account the December 2020 Commission proposals for platform regulation, as well as behavioural insights into consumer behaviour.

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.

In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) the right of States to control migration is firmly established despite strong indications that the effects of migration control are not racially neutral. In this article we attempt to understand how it is possible that the doctrine of sovereign migration control is not considered to breach the prohibition of racial discrimination. We argue that the ECtHR’s approach to migration and racial discrimination fits a pattern in the historical development of migration law whereby the right to travel, and the power of States to restrict this right, have been consistently defined in such a way as to protect the interests of the predominantly white population of today's global North. Hence, the ease with which the racialised impact of migration control is accepted as normal and compatible with the prohibition of racial discrimination is consistent with migration law's long history as part of colonial and postcolonial relations.

In the Middle Ages, goods washed up on the beach or fished up from the sea were an important economic asset. The customs and rules that determined the status of these goods are referred to as the ‘law of wreck’ or ‘right of wreck’. Several competing interest groups were involved: the local inhabitants as salvagers, finders or beach combers; merchants, skippers and ship-owners; landowners and the prince. Seventeenth century Dutch lawyers like Hugo Grotius and Johan van Heemskerk painted a favourable picture of the law of wreck in the Dutch Republic by pointing to the greed of the medieval counts of Holland who would only have exploited the misery of castaways. This article shows how the law of wreck developed in Holland and Zeeland in the late Middle Ages and how its rules were applied in the stewardship of North Holland between 1340 and 1400. Although the preserved accounts of the stewardship show that the count did take advantage of washed up goods, the count also had drowned people found on the beach buried and allowed merchants who could prove their goods had washed up on the Dutch beach to recover them.

Children around the world who have been found responsible for murder continue to be sentenced to indeterminate or long periods of detention. This is in contravention of children’s rights standards which urge a ban on the life sentence and require that detention is used only for the shortest appropriate period of time. Nonetheless, the public and victims of crime have a legitimate interest in the protection of public safety and appropriate accountability for serious offending. Further, there is little guidance on what a rights compliant approach in such cases might involve. This work builds on previous studies of how children are sentenced for murder across the common law world and extends the analysis to a selection of European civil law jurisdictions. It explores and applies recent updated guidance from the Committee on the Rights of the Child and seeks to develop a framework for a children’s rights and human rights compliant approach to such cases.

In the past decade or so, vulnerability has become a fairly prominent concept in human rights law. It has evolved from being an underlying notion to an explicit concept. This column takes stock of vulnerability's relationship to, and possible influence on human rights law, assessing the concept's potential and pitfalls. It focuses on the not altogether unrelated issues of migrants’ social rights and on the role of human rights in environmental protection. The discussion commences with a reflection on the potential of vulnerability to re-interrogate those aspects of the human rights paradigm that relate to environmental protection. The next section focuses on the potential of vulnerability to enhance migrants’ social rights within human rights law. Subsequently, it focuses on the pitfalls and the difficulties of the vulnerability concept. It concludes by offering an outlook for the future of the concept.

Smart city projects in Europe and North America are employing a novel approach to data analysis that processes hardly any or no personal data at all. As such, these projects—at least, for the most part—escape the scope of (European) data protection law. The idea behind this new approach to smartness can be condensed in the statement: “smart cities are only Big Brother to the masses.” In other words, if the data collected within smart city projects do not identify any individuals, then there are no issues with privacy and data protection law. This problematic assumption relies on two reductive understandings of key notions in this context: that of “personal privacy” and “personal surveillance.” In this contribution, I focus on the latter and call for a broader understanding of surveillance as a set of diverse modes of social control by privacy law scholars. After all, in order to reveal the underlying dynamics of power and how these might lead to surveillance abuse—even, or especially, when surveillance is based on the processing of seemingly non-personal data—concrete surveillance practices and their logics need to be examined. For this purpose, I take the example of the Stratumseind Living Lab in the Netherlands and examine it through the lens of Foucault’s notion of security. This examination leads to two valuable insights for privacy and data protection law scholars. First of all, it strengthens the argument of contemporary group privacy scholars that a narrow focus on individual privacy and surveillance is inadequate and that the regulatory framework needs to be adapted. The second insight raises another broad issue: smart cities, which function according to the securitizing logic of surveillance, such as the Stratumseind Living Lab, are transforming public spaces into consumption spaces. Yet, the protection of privacy in public can and should serve to protect key aspects of public space—political participation and sociability—as well.

In September 2012, the Dutch Supreme Court upheld a judgment of the Hague Court of Appeal that the eviction from basic shelter of a mother and her minor children, who did not have legal residence in the Netherlands, was unlawful. This ruling was instigated by a radically new interpretation of the European Social Charter’s personal scope and caused a major shift in Dutch policy.This article provides a case study into the legal reasoning adopted by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. It argues that, instead of relying on legal doctrinal reasoning for justifying the outcome, both courts referred to factors that the general public relies on to assess people’s deservingness of welfare. This finding raises fundamental questions about the relationship between human rights law and deservingness; and calls, therefore, for further research into the relevance of deservingness criteria in judicial discourse.

While studies have drawn attention to the operationalization, and implementation challenges associated with the ECOWAS free movement protocol, our understanding of how different categories of migrants experience the protocol is far more limited. Drawing on data from interviews conducted with 23 ECOWAS migrants living or travelling to Ghana, immigration officials and a trade union representative, this paper examines the diversity of experiences of ECOWAS migrants in relation to the free movement protocol. The findings suggest that the experiences of ECOWAS nationals in areas such as awareness and knowledge of provisions in the protocol, border crossing, processes of acquiring residence and work permits and renewing permits, and rights of establishment differ remarkably by dimensions of social difference. The gender, social class and nationality of migrants are fundamental and shape the experiences of ECOWAS migrants in divergent ways. These findings have important implication for policies seeking to promote free movement in West Africa.

Over the past few decades, child sexual abuse (‘CSA’) has become recognized as a serious and major problem in modern societies. Consequently, a common denominator in modern government policy is that CSA must be criminalized and pro-actively enforced. However, if national authorities are to be able to enforce, knowledge about the abuse is essential. Yet the disclosing of information to the authorities is hampered by the hidden nature of the offence. According to the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (Lanzarote) and EU Directive 2011/93 on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children, Member States should ‘encourage any person’ who knows about or suspects CSA to report this to the relevant authorities. To encourage such disclosure, several European governments have introduced mandatory reporting systems imposing a (non-criminal) duty on designated professionals to report information about or suspicions of CSA to the competent authorities.This article examines whether introducing a criminal duty to report CSA could be recommendable for the European Union or the Council of Europe in order to improve Member States’ knowledge of CSA and thus protect children more effectively against this type of violence. Using the outcomes of our recent study into the possibilities and impossibilities of extending the present Dutch criminal duty (aangifteplicht) to report rape, we argue that a criminal duty to report CSA is not recommendable as a means to encourage CSA disclosure by third parties.

In the period 2014–2019, the Dutch authorities governed the duration of asylum procedures in order to control the influx of asylum seekers. They prioritised and accelerated cases with poor chances of success, while they deprioritised cases with good chances of success. This resulted in long asylum procedures for asylum seekers with a likelihood of success and short asylum procedures for those with a poor chance of success. This article contends that this Dutch policy is an illustration of ‘temporal governance’: a governmental strategy to control and discipline migrants by means of time. This form of governance is based on a detailed knowledge of processes of asylum procedures, which enables qualification, categorisation and differentiation between different groups of asylum seekers. The focus of this research is on how such temporal governance functions and how it relates to law. A traditional understanding of law and sovereign power entails that law legitimates and restricts power. Strikingly, temporal governance regulating the asylum procedure seems to have a different relationship to law. This article demonstrates that legal standards, in this case the standards of European Union legislation, provide Member States a large amount of room (temporal discretion) to apply temporal governance. Moreover, only a few limited legal remedies remain available, if the duration of the asylum procedure appears unlawful. Instead of limiting temporal governance, law provides ample opportunity for the acceleration and deceleration of asylum cases in order to delay due process of asylum seekers and deter others from arriving. We cannot prove that the Dutch government aimed at deprioritising and decelerating complex asylum cases and cases with good chances of success – which would have been unlawful. However, this was the net result of their chosen policy. We illustrate that instead of a legitimation and restriction of sovereign power to govern the asylum influx by means of time, law can function as a set of tactics to pursue policy aims by employing ‘temporal governance’.

How to determine whether mobile Union citizens have a right to social assistance? Research has shown how Western European Member States have made efforts to restrict Union citizens’ access to their welfare systems over the past decade, whereby lawful residence has increasingly become the linchpin for entitlement. Member States have responded strikingly differently, however, to the complex administrative puzzle of dealing with open borders, the ability to verify lawful residence and the right to social assistance over time. This article makes an analytical and empirical contribution to existing literature by asking how Member States adjust their welfare/migration administrations to fit the Union’s free movement regime and what implications this has for Union citizens. Based upon comparative case studies into the administration of social assistance rights in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, the article develops a typology of three different models of administering Union citizens’ access to the welfare state: the form, signal and delegation models. Demonstrating how bureaucratic design impacts the stratification of social rights in the Member States in different ways, the article concludes that studying alternative administrative models offers important insights into the functioning of territorial welfare states in open border regimes.

The deployment of pervasive information and communication technologies (ICTs) within smart city initiatives transforms cities into extraordinary apparatuses of data capture. ICTs such as smart cameras, sound sensors and lighting technology are trying to infer and affect persons’ interests, preferences, emotional states, and behaviour. It should be no surprise then that contemporary legal and policy debates on privacy in smart cities are dominated by a debate focused on data and, therefore, on data protection law. In other words, data protection law is the go-to legal framework to regulate data processing activities within smart cities and similar initiatives. While this may seem obvious, a number of important hurdles might prevent data protection law to be (successfully) applied to such initiatives. In this contribution, we examine one such hurdle: whether the data processed in the context of smart cities actually qualifies as personal data, thus falling within the scope of data protection law. This question is explored not only through a theoretical discussion but also by taking an illustrative example of a smart city-type initiative – the Stratumseind 2.0 project and its living lab in the Netherlands (the Stratumseind Living Lab; SLL). Our analysis shows that the requirement of ‘identifiability’ might be difficult to satisfy in the SLL and similar initiatives. This is so for two main reasons. First, a large amount of the data at stake do not qualify as personal data, at least at first blush. Most of it relates to the environment, such as, data about the weather, air quality, sound and crowding levels, rather than to identified or even likely identifiable individuals. This is connected to the second reason, according to which, the aim of many smart city initiatives (including the SLL) is not to identify and target specific individuals but to manage or nudge them as a multiplicity – a combination of the environment, persons and all of their interactions. This is done by trying to affect the ‘atmosphere’ on the street. We thus argue that a novel type of profiling operations is at stake; rather than relying on individual or group profiling, the SLL and similar initiatives rely upon what we have called ‘atmospheric profiling’. We conclude that it remains highly uncertain, whether smart city initiatives like the SLL actually process personal data. Yet, they still pose risks for a wide variety of rights and freedoms, which data protection law is meant to protect, and a need for regulation remains.

This paper highlights the originality and scholarly contributions of the present Special Issue on transnational divorces in three ways. First, it examines two sets of related literature and situates the Special Issue within them: one on divorces, in general, and the other on divorces in transnational families (also called here “transnational divorce”). This exercise identifies the scholarly tendencies and gaps needing immediate attention in the study of divorce at the present age of family (re)composition. Second, the paper discusses how the special issue addresses the lacunas in the literature through “transborder intersectionality,” that is, a combination of transnational and intersectional perspectives. And third, based on its five empirically grounded case studies, it unveils the main structuring forces in transnational divorces: norms (social and legal), networks (transnational family support, local social ties…), and intersecting categories (gender, social class, legal status…). The paper ends with research directions for the future study of divorces traversing nation-states’ borders.

This special issue investigates citizenship and belonging in mixed-status families, i.e. families consisting of both citizens and non-citizens. We critique the standard perception of citizenship as ‘hard on the outside and soft on the inside’. For citizens with non-citizen family members, the exclusionary nature of citizenship is very much ‘inside’, in the very heart of their families. We deploy the concept of ‘performing intimate citizenship’ to understand how citizens deal with migration regulations that hinder them from living with their families. Often this is a first, shocking confrontation with state intervention into their private lives. Protesting such interventions–in court, in collective mobilisation, in letters to the authorities–involves making claims both about who belongs and about what ‘proper’ family is. Thus, citizens and their non-citizen family members ‘perform intimate citizenship’: they express what citizenship is and should be, by mobilising intersecting conceptions of intimacy and of belonging.

Academic literature has studied the legal consciousness of common citizens: the way ordinary people think and talk about law in their everyday lives. Building on this literature, we explore how Dutch female citizens with a migrant partner experience the impact of migration law on their everyday lives. We questioned how legal consciousness is linked to intimate citizenship, thus demonstrating how ‘private’ matters such as intimate relationships, marriage, and family have a profound impact on citizenship. Based on two sets of interviews, conducted in 2000 and 2016, we were able to determine how these women, despite being citizens formally, experienced the profound impact of increasingly restrictive family reunification policies. Contrary to our expectations, female sponsors continued to express considerable support for restrictive migration law. In performing intimate citizenship, they claimed an exception from the strict application of the rules for their particular family situation, rather than radical change.

The European Union has been running into the sand for some years now. In its early decades it offered a vision for Europe that had the capacity to inspire. European integration seemed a plausible route to individual freedom, and national wealth and security, while at the same time being built on lofty, and historically necessary, anti-nationalist values. When the path to the moral high ground is also the path of self-interest one tends not to look for another route.

Zacharias Huber (1669-1732) evaluated in the revised Heedensdaegse Rechtsgeleertheyt arguments, hitherto unknown, which were brought forward in a case, pursued before the Court of Friesland and decided on December 14th 1718. The case dealt with the ownership of a box with gold, found on the beach of Schiermonnikoog in 1710 and which came from the ship De Witte Haas, shipwrecked off the coast in 1674. Newly found civil records show that Maria Wilree (1667-1729) from Amsterdam started the procedure to recover the box with gold, because it purportedly belonged to her father Dirck Wilree (1636-1674), director-general for the West India Company in Guinea and who died in the shipwrecking. She took legal action against Henrica Helmhout, regent of Schiermonnikoog and receiver of wrecks, and Gillis Vermeersch, representative of the West India Company. Only Vermeersch was successful in his argument, which he based on the instructions of the Company: it was forbidden to transport unregistered private goods. Such goods forfeited immediately to the Company. Consequently, Wilree claimed for the Company ownership and possession of the box with gold. Helmhout claimed to be the owner by prescription. Their arguments appear not to have been convincing.

Climate change is often seen as an issue of intergenerational equity—consumption now creates costs for future generations. However, radical mitigation now would reverse the problem, creating immediate costs for current generations, while the benefits would be primarily for future ones. This is a policy problem, as persuading those living now to bear the cost of changes whose benefits will mostly accrue after their deaths is politically difficult. The policy challenge is then how to temporally match costs to benefits, either by deferring mitigation costs, or by speeding up climatic benefits. Geoengineering may provide some help here, as it might enable climate change to be slowed more immediately, at a lower upfront cost, and allow a greater share of the mitigation and adaptation burden to be passed on to those in the future who will benefit most.

Irregular migrants in Europe are increasingly subjected to state coercion, surveillance and spatial restrictions, such as containment, dispersal and forced transfers. Lawyers usually evaluate such practices in the light of human rights law, which only provides limited protection. For this reason, I propose an alternative normative framework to evaluate and assess coercive state practices towards irregular migrants: the concept of freedom as non-domination. In this article, I conceptualize non-domination from a rule of law perspective. To this end, I start from Lovett’s procedural account of arbitrariness; and complement this with Benton’s focus on unaccountable power and Palombella’s argument for ‘duality of law’. In the second part of this article, I apply this normative framework to coercive practices in shelters for irregular migrants in the Netherlands. This allows me to demonstrate the practical relevance and consequences of the theory. It discloses how the protection of freedom as non-domination, conceptualized from a rule of law perspective, sets more demanding criteria for the (courts of) law than the protection of human rights. At the same time, it does not require non-interference or elaborate positive obligations from the state. For irregular migrants, who do not have the right to reside in the territory, but who are entirely under the control of state power, non-domination as conceptualized in this paper provides, in my view, a necessary framework of review that ensures a kind of protection that is currently lacking.

This paper sheds light on the role of non-governmental/civil society organisations, as well as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in the externalisation of migration management in Tunisia and Egypt. These organisations are involved in migration-related activities, which, from the externalisation perspective, should prevent people from attempting the sea-crossing to Europe, thus immobilising them in North Africa. The paper is an ethnographic border regime analysis drawing on extensive fieldwork. It shows that European Union-externalisation is not a univocal and smooth process. Instead, externalisation is entangled in a complex network of actors and dynamics. Measures meant to support externalisation may produce effects contrary to those envisaged, whereas practices accomplishing externalisation goals may be in fact the result of internalisation. By analysing the various actors in their diverse practices and in their—sometimes conflictual—relationships, the paper also tries to minimise state-centrism and Euro-centrism in the study of externalisation.

National authorities are often reluctant to arrange for a forensic medical examination or to grant important weight to forensic medical reports in asylum cases. They do not (fully) accept that a forensic medical report may change their initial assessment of the credibility of the applicant’s asylum account. They may argue that a physician cannot establish the context (date, location, perpetrator) in which the alleged ill-treatment has taken place or the cause of a specific scar or medical problem of the applicant. Moreover, they may contend that the physician concerned did not have the expertise to write a forensic medical report. This article examines how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Committee against Torture (CAT) have included forensic medical reports in their assessment of asylum cases and how they have dealt with the ‘context’, ‘causality’ and ‘expertise’ argument. It shows that these bodies do not accept that national authorities refrain from arranging a forensic medical examination or attach no or limited weight to a forensic medical report submitted by the applicant, just because the applicant has made inconsistent, incoherent or vague statements. They also do not accept general references to the ‘context’, ‘causality’ and ‘expertise’ argument. However, they have accepted these arguments in some individual cases, often without clear reasoning. The article concludes that the ECtHR and CAT could provide more guidance to national authorities concerning the role of forensic medical reports in asylum cases by explicitly weighing the seriousness of the credibility issues against the forensic medical report and by paying attention to the requirements for forensic medical reports laid down in the Istanbul Protocol.

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable and boring routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected, disruptive and disordered elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. The collective discussion recovers the disruptive work of a range of rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war. We do so through engaging a series of ‘world pictures' (Mitchell 2007). We show the worlding enacted in rituals such as colonial treaty-making, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts,algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. It emphasises the role of rituals in generating dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than in imposing a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.