Samenvatting

With the help of a model of policy formation designed by John Kingdon, we seek to map the actors in the previous cases of legal change and to establish the way in which they performed their key role and what conditions allowed them to do that. It appears that only two of the actors are insiders, government officials. The rest are outsiders. According to Kingdon’s model, a particular kind of actors is most likely to play a key role in policy change. He calls them ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and they typically are experts in a particular field of policy, who spend time, energy and money to promote a proposal they favour. They spring into action when they seize an opportunity to push their proposal on the agenda of the decision-makers. In our small collection of actors, Lemkin, Sinzheimer and Leenen are prototypical ‘policy entrepreneurs’. The others do not fit this profile, but played an influential role nevertheless.