More than 10.74 million people globally are detained in penal institutions. An estimated 40% to 90% of these detainees suffer from mental illness. This makes the prevalence of mental disorder in detainees extremely high compared with the general population (18% to 29%). As a consequence, defendants and detainees with mental illness are not ‘yet another vulnerable group’ that should be ‘taken into account’ in developing laws and policies On the contrary, they are a dominant force and t...

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 ...

Law finds its roots in human experience and its expression in language. It cannot be administered, studied or taught without the instrumentality of language. The focus on language enlarges and deepens comparative studies. This volume features a wide array of comparative perspectives encompassing Law and Language, inviting readers to deepen their understanding of their many interactions, casting new lights that benefit jurists and linguists alike. It invites to interdisciplinary collaboration,...

When Christopher Columbus (circa 1451-1506) arrived at the Bahamas in 1492, it could hardly be predicted that this would result in the most dramatic upheaval in the history of the American continent and the nearby islands. The encounter with the new world inaugurated an era of conquest, colonisation, and economic exploitation by European powers that would last for several centuries. Large numbers of Europeans settled in these newly acquired territories, bringing along their own culture and re...

This volume contains the proceedings of the 64th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space held virtually in October 2021, as well as the report of the IISL Standing Committee on the Status of International Agreements Relating to Activities in Outer Space.

On 27 January 1186 the German king Henry VI, son and heir of the Roman Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, married Constance of Hauteville, heir to the throne of Sicily, in the Basilica of St Ambrose in Milan. The royal wedding sealed the union of the Kingdom of Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire, creating an enormous empire stretching from the shores of the North Sea to the beaches of Africa. The union also incited a major geopolitical conflict dominating European politics in the thirteenth ...