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 ...

Emotions such as guilt and shame motivate us to keep our actions in line with normative expectations and are therefore essential in regulating our social and moral lives. Guilt, Shame and Juvenile Delinquency provides a compelling argument for the importance of considering guilt and shame as part of the etiological underpinnings of juvenile delinquency. It presents a comprehensive review of the criminological literature on the relationship between shame, guilt and offending, and it integrates...

Terrorism trials are an exceptional opportunity for better understanding and, hence, countering terrorism, since they are often the only place where most if not all of the actors of a terrorist incident meet again, and where the media report and broadcast their respective accounts. A nexus between terrorist violence, law enforcement and public opinion, terrorism trials showcase justice in progress and thus demonstrate to the world how terrorism suspects are treated under national law.

This vo...

Belgium has one of the highest numbers of Jihadist fighters per capita in Europe. A large group of often young men and women left Belgium for the IS Caliphate in Syria and Iraq. This book focuses on the law governing this situation, with its aim being twofold. First, it provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the legal framework. Second, it provides suggestions on how to improve the framework, both with a view to effectiveness and with respect for fundamental rights and principles.

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Age of consent refers to the age below which it is prohibited to engage in sexual activities with a child. The legislators always need to keep a balance between protecting children from sexual abuse and respecting their sexual autonomy while setting the age boundary. In addition, as a legal concept, age of consent is closely related with the construction of childhood and once set, it affects the age at which children engage in sex.

The age of consent legislation in Europe have been revised tr...

The concentration camps are closed. Auschwitz is over. Every year we commemorate and say we never want this again. But why then do we still have systems in our Western society in which people are locked up in degrading conditions? Is Auschwitz really over? To answer this question, this book makes a comparison between the camp structure of Auschwitz and the basic structure of the current prison system in the United States. This prison system houses 2.3 million guilty or innocent people in degr...