Companies on their Paths to Justice: How Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Netherlands Deal with Potential Legal Problems

This article presents the results of a recently completed study into the serious and potential legal problems that Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises face, the opponents they encounter and the legal service providers that they engage to deal with these problems. The study is based on two surveys among the 2,300 members of the SME panel of the EIM Business & Policy Research

Public opinion on lay participation in the criminal justice system of the Netherlands<br> Some tentative findings from a panel survey

In the Netherlands the recent debate on lay involvement in the administration of criminal justice was initiated by politicians who maintain that the public favours such involvement. The response of the judiciary and legal academics to these politicians has been fairly defensive. They have pointed in particular to the dangers of the punitive character of the vox populi and rejected the idea. As a result, the debate on lay involvement has quickly become a black and white issue. This article presents the findings of a recent research of the Netherlands Council for the Judiciary and the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice regarding the opinion of the public on different kinds of lay involvement under different conditions. This research shows that both the position of the politicians that favour lay involvement in the administration of criminal justice and the position of the judiciary and legal academics that reject lay involvement are to a relatively large degree unrepresentative of the wishes and views of the public

Thy Brother’s Keeper? The Relationship between Social Distance and Intensity of Dehumanization during Genocide

This paper puts forth the hypothesis that the degree of social distance between perpetrator and vic- tim groups prior to the outbreak of genocide is inversely related to the degree of severity of dehu- manization employed by the perpetrator group during genocide. Derived from psychological theory, this hypothesis is illustrated by using a primarily literature-based method of analysis combined with a vignette-designed severity of dehumanization scale. Three genocides are compared: the Rwandan Genocide, the Holocaust as it occurred in Western Europe, and the Holocaust as it occurred in East- ern Europe. The findings for Rwanda and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe show a negative correla- tion between the two variables, confirming the hypothesis. The results for Western Europe, however, present somewhat of an anomaly; variations in the extermination policies of the German perpetra- tors in Eastern and Western Europe correspond to this difference and can, in this case, provide a possible explanation for the incongruity

'Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan': een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen van joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940-1945

ICS dissertation of the Radboud University Nijmegen. In this dissertation, new light is shed on the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during the German occupation of 1940 till 1945. The study aims to explain the variation that existed among the Dutch municipalities in the percentage of Jews that survived the war. Several causes are taken into account: background characteristics of the Jews themselves, the degree of local pillarization, the relative numbers of local ant-Semites and members of the National Socialist auxiliary voluntary police force, the denomination of the local population, the degree to which the local police force collaborated, the affiliation of the local burgomaster and the behaviour of the regional bureau of the German Sicherheitspolizei. By applying methods and techniques of case-oriented as well as variable-oriented research on archival material that has hardly been used until now, this thesis revises many of the existing ideas regarding the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands. Includes a summary in Englis