This project explores the obstacles standing in the way of protecting digital privileged exchanges in criminal investigations through AI filtering. A high-profile fraud case involving thousands of privileged emails exposed the limitations of traditional keyword-based filtering. Despite AIs potential to enhance efficiency and accuracy, its deployment remains unrealised. Employing empirical socio-legal methods, including interviews and focus groups with police, prosecutors and attorneys, this research will identify legal, technical, and organisational requirements of an effective AI filtering system. This pioneering study will inform the ongoing modernisation of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure and safeguard professional privilege in the digital era.

Legal psychologists write expert witness reports in court cases. Such reports can affect judges’ and juries’ decisions. Often the reports describe how thinking errors may have biased decision-making at various stages of the criminal justice process. For example, police officers may have been subject to confirmation bias by focusing on evidence supporting their suspicions while ignoring contradictory information. Since biases are fundamentally ingrained in human thinking processes, the question arises whether legal psychologists themselves are also vulnerable to biases. The researchers will analyze real Dutch reports and conduct four experiments to test whether legal psychologists themselves are vulnerable to bias.

Genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are the most serious crimes of international concern. These international crimes, such as committed in the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda or Cambodia and, earlier, during World War II and in Armenia, entail widespread mortality and victimisation, as well as long-lasting societal trauma and disruption, that may take generations to heal. While for some conflicts, domestic courts have eventually prosecuted these crimes, the international community has established international criminal courts and tribunals to ensure that ?justice is done? and the most culpable perpetrators do not go unpunished. However, the simultaneous operating of these different legal systems - with different legal traditions and differing dogmatic underpinnings - has generated incidents where perpetrators of similarly serious crimes received widely different sentences. It has, however, not been established how structural such inconsistency is. Inconsistency may be problematic not only from a normative point of view by violating the principle of equality and fairness, but may threaten the legitimacy of international criminal justice. Indeed, surveys have reported large discontent in post-conflict societies with international criminal justice and in particular with the leniency and ?unfairness? of sentences at the international level. This study has been designed to address this situation. By combining qualitative legal case file analysis with quantitative regression analysis, it will assess to what extent inconsistency of sentencing of international crimes occurs, as well as identify factors that generate inconsistency. The findings will be laid down in an ?International Sentencing Handbook? that will, employing domestic as well as international academic and legal practitioners expertise, offer remedies to harmonize the sentencing of international crimes. The study is not only innovative from an academic perspective, but is also vital for the acceptance by post-conflict societies of international criminal courts and tribunals, which will in many instances remain crucial to hold accountable the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.

How do professional money launderers and money laundering networks organize their business? Academic research hardly investigates this important link between illegal revenues and the legal economy, despite the high estimated amounts of criminal money laundered in the Netherlands and abroad and the many far-reaching measures that are taken against money laundering. Therefore, the scientific knowledge base about this important link is extremely limited, and anti-money laundering policies are to a large extent based on untested assumptions about how criminals launder their illicit revenues and to what extent they make use of financial facilitators. Compared to other countries, the Netherlands provides – through intensive research collaboration between academic researchers and law enforcement – a unique opportunity to focus on this missing link in money laundering research. The proposed study combines quantitative and qualitative data on the personal and criminal histories of a nationwide sample of financial facilitators, the criminals they associate with, and their contacts with other financial facilitators, to gain a systematic and in-depth understanding of how financial facilitators get involved in illegal practices, the extent to which they provide their services in a business-like manner, and the ways in which the criminal environment they operate in is structured. Given the rich and longitudinal data available, the proposed study is able to test competing theoretical predictions based on criminal career and life-course criminology, organized crime research, and criminal network studies and make a significant contribution to international academic research in this domain.

From the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the flaring tensions between China and Taiwan, recent events have breathed new life into a legal concept that had remained dormant since the World War II-era Nazi trials: the crime of aggression. A central question that arises is whether this crime is amenable to the universal jurisdiction of domestic courts under customary international law. This project combines empirical, historical and legal-dogmatic research to critically evaluate whether international law provides a legal basis for states to assert universal jurisdiction over the crime of aggression and prosecute it in their national courts.