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Jos Hoevenaars joins Vici ‘Affordable Justice’ team

On 1 November 2023, Jos Hoevenaars re-joined Erasmus School of Law after completing a one-year research project at the Dutch Council for the Judiciary which focused on questions of effectiveness of judgments in the Dutch legal system (report available early 2024). Previously, he was part of our ERC ‘Building EU civil justice’ team, where his research focused mainly on (self)representation in court and access to justice in a cross-border context. In 2022, he was the executive project manager for a study commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security and its Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) that looked into the usefulness and necessity of a litigation fund for collective actions in the Netherlands (Dutch report available here, English book forthcoming).

The coming years he will strengthen the Vici ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ team, focusing on costs and funding of collective actions, and he will develop a new line of research in the area of strategic litigation in which he will investigate the collective and representative action field from a legal mobilisation perspective. He will also play a role in the setting up of a European Civil Justice Centre.

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Published: January 10, 2022

From December 2021 – June 2022, the team of the Vici project ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ at Erasmus School of Law organizes an online seminar series dedicated to Trends and Challenges in Costs and Funding of Civil Justice.

The second seminar was dedicated to Legal Mobilization: A European Perspective, and took place on 19 January 2022, 15-17 CET. This discussed recent scholarship on legal mobilization at the Pan-European level in the context of EU Migration Law, EU Data Protection Law, and European Human Rights Law.

Lisa Harms (University of Münster) presented on Human rights advocacy and the transnational regulation of religion: The case of Muslim legal mobilization. She focused on the case of Muslim legal mobilization at the ECtHR and present quantitative data collected regarding the legal mobilization of religious groups at the ECtHR as well as in-depth interviews conducted with litigants and their supporters.

Virginia Passalacqua (Utrecht University) presented on Legal mobilization via preliminary references: the case of migrant rights. She discussed how the EU Court of Justice became a central venue for migrant rights defenders that increasingly rely on the preliminary reference procedure to challenge national anti-migration policies. However, legal mobilization varies greatly among Member States: some countries make multiple references and others make none. Virginia Passalacqua’s presentation will shed light on the factors that facilitate or hamper legal mobilization for migrant rights before the EU Court.

Sanja Badanjak (University of Edinburgh)prestented on Constitutional review as an opportunity structure for legal mobilization in the EU. She addressed how constitutional complaints offer routes through which citizens’ mobilization in defence of their rights may be realized. In the EU, this can be used to voice opposition and change EU law via the preliminary reference procedure. However, this also requires further consideration of cross-country variation in citizens’ access to constitutional litigation.