How are law and governance in China responding to rapidly changing circumstances, and what does that mean for the relationship between the state and its citizens?

Large areas of space are filled by molecular clouds that consist of gas and dust grains that are the remnants of dead stars. When these clouds start collapsing, the decreasing temperature and increasing density cause gas particles to start accreting onto dust grain surfaces.

Vice-rector Organisatieontwikkeling en oud-decaan FGGA Erwin Muller start op 1 april 2026 als staatsraad bij de Afdeling Advisering van de Raad van State.

Hungary belongs to the EU, but democracy is being seriously and systematically threatened there. Does the rest of the EU have the means and the political will to deal with member states that are out of step? Antoaneta Dimitrova, professor of 'Comparative Governance' at the Institute of Security and…

Daniel Peat will represent the ISDS Academic Forum, a group of over 150 academics whose research focusses on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), at forthcoming discussions on the reform of the ISDS system taking place in New York.

USMCA (North American Free Trade Agreement) is the successor to NAFTA – a free trade zone covering Canada, the United States and Mexico. This Agreement includes a new procedure to ensure compliance with fundamental labour rights.

On Thursday 24 May 2018, Tanja Masson-Zwaan of Leiden University’s International Institute of Air and Space Law and Prof Mahulena Hofmann of the University of Luxembourg had the honour of addressing the King and Queen of the Netherlands and the Grand-Duc and Grand-Duchess of Luxembourg during the State…

The European Commission has started an investigation into possible illegal state aid from the Netherlands to Nike. It is high time that agreements between Tax Authorities and multinationals are made public, says Associate Professor in Tax Law Jan Vleggeert.

Physical chemist Rik Mom developed a revolutionary way to investigate catalysts in action in detail. For this work he received the distinction cum laude during his PhD defence on 29 June.

It is time for the international community to put a stop to war crimes – especially against medical personnel, argued international chair of Doctors Without Borders Joanne Liu in her Cleveringa lecture.

Collaboration within Europe is currently at a low ebb. This is threatening to undermine our freedom and the rights that are anchored in the European legal order, says Piet Hein Donner, Vice-President of the Council of State and Cleveringa professor at Leiden University for 2015. His lecture on 26 November…

Research conducted by the University of Leiden and the University of Curaçao found that the rights of undocumented children in Curaçao, mostly from Venezuela, are severely under threat, which does not trigger rigorous actions by the Curaçaoan and Dutch authorities.

The way age is determined by the IND is being questioned as a result of several court rulings. The problem is that it is difficult to determine whether a young asylum seeker is just over or under the age of 18. So far there is no suitable way to determine exactly how old someone is, Mark Klaassen, associate…

Lydie Cabane, Assistant Professor in Governance of Crises at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, recently published the book The Government of Disasters. In this book Lydie explores how the South African state bureaucracy reacts to disasters.

This article studies the securitization of immigration in the United States of America (U.S.), through the analysis of the National Security Strategies (NSS) published between 2002 and 2017, using a two-layered analytical framework that combines securitization theory and agenda setting theory.

Carola Schoor, programme manager for Public Affairs at the Centre for Professional Learning (CPL), reflects on Politico on the State of the European Union speech by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen from a political strategy and messaging perspective.

In a new essay for Ethics & International Affairs, Dr Henning Lahmann, Assistant Professor of International Law & Technology at eLaw, addresses the question whether states should resort to social media to warn a civilian population ahead of military operations.

The Guardian interviewed professor Marlou Schrover about the increasing number of trans refugees from the United States.

What is the impact of Indonesia’s democratization process on everyday state-citizen relations?

During the corona pandemic, the Chinese government's digital communication with its citizens changed. Hard propaganda was increasingly replaced by ‘soft news’. PhD candidate Dechun Zhang mapped the developments in digital society.

Recently, the so-called refugee crisis has been framed as a threat for well-developed welfare states in Europe by the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. According to him, external borders have to be guarded, because otherwise ‘loads of people will come to demand support and they blow up…

On 3 March 2024, the Swiss electorate decided in a sensational referendum in favour of an increase in the state old-age pension.

The Centre for Global Heritage and Development has been successful in applying for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the topic of threatened heritage at ICTO, the platform for innovation and education at Leiden University.

The lecture series

De asielplannen van minster Faber leveren de nodige commotie op binnen politiek Den Haag. Wilders wil geen enkele concessies doen en dreigt met verkiezingen. De Raad van State oordeelt nl. negatief op de wetsvoorstellen. Wim Voermans, zegt in Nieuwsuur dat ‘de plannen juridisch net binnen de lijntjes…

Ben Van Rompuy, associate professor of European Competiton Law, appeared on 15 April as an expert before the European Parliament's Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and also authored a briefing paper with recommendations to effectively address Territorial Supply Constraints…

Leiden University has started the sustainable demolition of the old LCP building of the Faculty of Science.

On 14 June 2020, Maartje van der Woude was invited to participate on NPO Radio 1 to talk about extra controls at borders to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus.

An international team of researchers with Pascale Ehrenfreund from Leiden University has discovered that the dust particles of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko are made up of even smaller particles. This discovery confirms that clumps of dust form the basis for comets and planets.

On Thursday 28 January 2016, Prof. Carsten Stahn contributed to the OPCW Sub-Working Group on Non-State Actors, together with Professors Andrew Clapham (Geneva) and Dapo Akande (Oxford), in the presence of the Ahmet Üzümcü, Director-General of the OPCW.

How can the emergence of primary justice systems be facilitated and furthered?

On Tuesday 22 January 2019, Beryl ter Haar participated in a comparative law lecture featuring labour law cases of the constitutional court of South Africa at the Kutafin State Law University Moscow, Russia. Topics discussed included short term employment contracts, the right to strike and the right…

How to deal with the Pyongyang regime? Is North Korea irrational? Prof. Remco Breuker proposes a new approach.

On the 28th of January 2019 Beryl ter Haar gave a guest lecture at Tbilisi State University organised by the European Law School Association (ELSA). The lecture addressed issues of EU fundamental rights, more particularly it was on the freedom to conduct a business versus several labour rights, among…

Researchers from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry show proof of principle that live-cell structural changes and metabolic processes can be followed in real time with NMR spectroscopy. They performed their study on photosynthetic green algae that are metabolically flexible and can sustain energy generation…

The Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, in collaboration with the ESIL Interest Group on International Criminal Justice and the Journal of International Criminal Justice (JICJ, OUP), is pleased to invite public international scholars, students and practitioners to attend a conference that…

A new report on admissibility under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on a Communications Procedure (OP3) has been published.

How did dynastic organization – that it, the employment of non-ruling family members and the development of dynastic traditions and concepts – influence state formation in both Catholic Europe and Muslim West-Asia?

How should we address our colonial heritage? And how digital and accessible are our collections? Outgoing State Secretary Fleur Gräper spoke with researchers and heritage specialists about this on 25 January.

Dr. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from eLaw collaborates with researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) and University of Delhi (DU) in an effort to explore and reflect upon the potential legal, ethical and pedagogical challenges of deploying a social robot in…

The global transition toward low-carbon energy systems and the rapid expansion of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, are reshaping how modern societies produce, move, and process energy and information.

The new welfare state is said to be close to its citizens and does not dominate, but cooperate. “But this paradigm has a hard time to acknowledge the power relation that shapes the relation between state and citizens,” says Anouk de Koning in the interview 'The Downsides of Equality Talk in the Welfare…

There is a growing conflict between the US and the EU about the investigation by the Commission under the EU State aid rules into so called

On 30 January, GTGC hosted a special event together with the Embassy of Ireland. As part of his visit to the Netherlands, John Concannon, Director General of the Global Ireland Unit of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, came to the university to engage in a discussion about Ireland's role in international…

The Netherlands will comply with the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Netanyahu and proceed to arrest him as soon as he enters Dutch territory. Jens Iverson,Assistant Professor of Public International Law, discusses the issue in Dutch daily newspaper ‘Trouw’.

Two citizens, together with organisations including Amnesty International, antidiscrimination agency RADAR and the Dutch Section of the International Commission of Jurists (NJCM) have brought legal action against the State. They want the court to put an end to the discriminating border controls of the…

The main objective of this thesis was to develop clinically relevant survival models for patients with high-grade soft tissue sarcoma of the extremities, in particular the development and validation of prediction models for use in clinical practice.