The Promised Land: A Study of Trafficking in Women from Central and Eastern Europe to the Netherlands

This study on trafficking in women from Central and Eastern Europe explores the contextual factors, the characteristics, and the motivation of victims as well as the methods of traffickers. A combination of rational choice theory, strain theory and social control theory forms the theoretical framework of our research. Based on information from experts in the field, interviews with victims, questionnaires, a study of dossiers and a search of the literature, we developed a typology of victims, which may be helpful for prevention and law enforcement.     

Deconstructing the Shariatic Justification of Suicide Bombings

Deconstructing the shariatic justification of suicide bombings reveals a standard reasoning based on four arguments. Two of them relativize the shariatic prohibition against suicide whereas the other two analogize suicide bombings with the medieval combat tactic of plunging alone into the enemy. Prerequisites of a “martyrdom operation” are the suicide bomber's intention to seek martyrdom and his ability to damage the enemy. The reasoning declares the killing of oneself for the sake of Islam permissible and thereby distinguishes “martyrdom operations” from suicide. Deconstructing this and other Islamist doctrines of violence can be of operational use to intelligence and criminal investigations.     

Quantitative indices for anti-human trafficking policies: based on reports of the U.S. State Department and the Council of Europe

Quantitative ratings of policies of national governments are an important tool for the monitoring of compliance with international standards in many domains. In this article we present a global index of anti-human trafficking policies developed by a research consortium using the TIP country reports of the U.S. State Department (the 3P index) and an index based on the reports of the monitoring body of the Council of Europe Convention against Human Trafficking (GRETA). Although the global 3P index gives more favorable ratings to most European countries than the GRETA-based index, a moderately strong correlation was found between the two indices. This is an encouraging result lending support to the validity of the assessments of both monitoring mechanisms as well as to their transformation into quantitative scores. We also demonstrate that the detailed GRETA-based index can be used to identify best practices in anti-trafficking policies and specific areas where these policies are most in need of improvement, e.g. legal aid and compensation for victims. Our analyses of the relationships between the various items of the index revealed positive correlations between the existence of units of specialized prosecutors and the numbers of convictions of traffickers. Our paper, then, demonstrates the potential of quantitative indices of counter human trafficking policies as tools for both effective monitoring of the implementation of international standards and for analytical purposes.     

Lord Mustill and the Courts of Tennis – Dallah v Pakistan in England,France and Utopia

This note analyses the reasoning of the English and French courts in Dallah Real Estate and Tourism Holding Co v Ministry of Religious Affairs, Government of Pakistan, in which an arbitral tribunal had accepted jurisdiction over the Government of Pakistan on the basis of an arbitration agreement concluded by a trust that was created, controlled, and then extinguished by the Government. It highlights the English courts' clarifications on the degree to which arbitral awards should benefit from the presumption of validity at the stage of enforcement and discusses how the cultural background of the English and French judges – and of the arbitrators – drove them to come to contradictory results. Moreover, it argues that both judges and arbitrators, owing to the way the parties framed their arguments, probably missed the proper solution of the case.