International crimes cause widespread victimisation and destruction, leading to social disruption that may take generations to repair. Over the years, the international community has established international courts to end the culture of impunity in relation to such crimes and to enforce a culture of accountability. A critical success factor for these courts is to ensure that they are perceived as legitimate in post-conflict societies.

Established after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi eth...

Addiction is pervasively present within the criminal justice sector, resulting in legal professionals regularly dealing with addicted defendants. Yet addiction is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, resulting in controversies regarding its conceptualisation, and thus difficulties in addressing addiction-related crime in court. Over the last decades, addiction has increasingly been conceptualised as a brain disease, which arguably could alter the law’s current approach towards the crimin...

What practical problems are at stake in current EAW surrender proceedings? The research project Improving Mutual Recognition of European Arrest Warrants through Common Practical Guidelines of which the three country reports for Greece, the Netherlands and Poland are now published, is a follow-up of an earlier project that led to the publication of The European Arrest Warrant and In Absentia Judgments, Maastricht Law Series No.12 In AbsentiEAW. This project is broader than in absentia alone an...

The ImprovEAW-project concerns European Arrest Warrant proceedings in seven Member States (Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania). Maastricht Law Series No. 23 contains the country reports for Greece, the Netherlands and Poland. ImprovEAW is a follow up to an earlier project that focused on In Absentia Judgments (Maastricht Law Series No. 12). This book looks at various other aspects of the EAW surrender procedure that are problematic in practice, such as the ...

A transfer of criminal proceedings may take place between a judicial authority from one Member State and a judicial authority in another Member State when it is in the interest of a proper administration of justice that a criminal offence is further investigated and prosecuted in the second Member State.

There was a general feeling among experts on judicial cooperation in the Member States that the current practice of transferring criminal proceedings could and should be improved. Researchers...