What do we know about the criminological aspects of international crimes? What do they entail and what are facilitating factors which can help us understand their causes and how should we respond to these crimes? Are international crimes merely a more extreme form of ordinary crimes or are they a different kind of criminality? In the past few years a growing number of scholars both at a national and at an international level have devoted their scholarly attention to this important and urgent research theme. In this special issue we aim to present a number of articles in which different perspectives on this topic are presented. By doing so we hope to enhance our knowledge of this phenomenon and to provide an impulse to further criminological research within this area in both the Netherlands and Belgium. This introductory article gives an overview of the state of the art of international crime criminology in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the rest of the world.

The Netherlands pursues an active policy of excluding and prosecuting potential perpetrators of international crimes. In recent years hundreds of people have been excluded from taking part in the asylum procedure. Bringing cases to court, however, has proven to be very difficult in practice. Most excluded persons reside illegally in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. A good overview of the grounds upon which persons have been excluded and with what types of crimes they are associated is currently lacking. The Netherlands – actually the international community as a whole – still struggles with a number of legal and ethical issues. International law, for example, does not provide an adequate solution for some convicted excluded asylum seekers after their release.

During the 1990s the Serbian government entered into a symbiotic relationship with criminals and paramilitary units which led to a normalization of crime and violence. While society usually inhibits people from criminal behavior, in Serbia this process was reversed. Propaganda contained the neutralization techniques that allowed people to condone and even approve of violent and criminal behavior. The reversal of the moral order became part of Serbia’s popular culture in which criminals who had committed many atrocities during the war, like Arkan, were honored. In this way, Arkan served not only a military and strategic purpose but also a political one, by generating support for the war.

During the Second World War, a large number of prisoners were put to work in concentration camps in order to contribute to the development of Germany. As this labour became more important in economic terms during the years 1939 to 1945, the death toll in the camps also rose during the same period. This contribution aims at providing insight into the apparent contradiction (paradox) between the practices of extermination on the one hand and the German economic interests on the other hand. Not only has historiography paid relatively little attention to this phenomenon (it is not a main topic), criminology has also remained remarkably silent during this debate. Looking at the ‘plantation’ in Dachau concentration camp (1937-1945) we develop an exploratory analysis of the subject. Using Vaughan’s organizational criminology, we discuss the paradox and address the question of the extent to which criminology can offer explanations for phenomena of this kind.

In the current literature on child soldiers, many assumptions are made about the use of child soldiers worldwide. The duration of conflicts and thus increasing number of battle related deaths would influence the use of child soldiers. Another assumption is that child soldiers are mainly used in civil wars. In this article, these assumptions are tested empirically and the characteristics of conflicts in which child soldiers are used and conflicts in which they are not used are compared. However, conducting quantitative research on child soldiers is not easy. Many data are obtained through interviews and are based on unconfirmed reports and observations, which raises questions about how the data should be assessed. This study is an explorative study into the possibilities of testing some of the current assumptions.

This article develops a victimological perspective on international criminal justice, based on a review of the main victimological characteristics of international crimes. These include the complicity or active involvement of government agencies, the large numbers of victims and the peculiar position of international crime victims who, at the time the crimes are committed, are usually not viewed as victims by the perpetrators, but placed outside the moral sphere or even depicted as perpetrators rather than victims.Key elements of this perspective concern the external coherence of the criminal justice reaction - the interlinking of criminal justice with other reparative efforts - as well as its internal coherence - the extent to which the procedures of international criminal justice are aligned with what it realistically can and should achieve. With internal coherence in mind, the article examines the victimological findings relating to the main rights of victims in the criminal procedure (recognition/acknowledgement, information/participation and compensation/reparation) and subsequently analyzes how the specifics of international crimes moderate them.

In this contribution the author reviews De aanklager by F. de Vlaming..

In this contribution the author reviews Public support for vigilantism by N.E. Haas.