Jannemieke Ouwerkerk appointed Full Professor of European Criminal Law
As from 1 August 2016 Jannemieke Ouwerkerk will be appointed to the position of Full Professor of European Criminal Law at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology of Leiden University. It concerns a full-time position. She will deliver her inaugural lecture on 7 April 2017 at 16.00.
Jannemieke Ouwerkerk has a law degree from Utrecht University and is currently employed as an Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law of Tilburg Law School. In 2011 she obtained her PhD degree for her dissertation Quid Pro Quo? A comparative law perspective on the mutual recognition of judicial decisions in criminal matters (Intersentia, 2011). In 2014, she was awarded a grant under the VENI scheme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the research project Symbol or substance? Towards a systematic application of criminalisation criteria in EU Law. She is a member of the Meijers Committee (Standing Committee of Experts on International Immigration, Refugee and Criminal Law) and a member of the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice.
EU criminal law
The research activities of Ouwerkerk encompass the various branches of EU criminal law. Although criminal law is a relatively young area of EU competence, the Lisbon Treaty envisages wide powers to enact legislation in this field. Such legislation may concern cross-border cooperation (e.g. on surrender, transnational evidence gathering) as well as common standards both with regard to substantive criminal law (one can think of sanction levels) and procedural criminal law (e.g. defence rights, procedural rights for victims of crime). In her research, Ouwerkerk also deals with the influence of EU criminal law on national criminal justice systems, in particular Dutch criminal law and criminal procedure.
The exercise of EU criminalisation powers
In the course of a research project she is currently conducting, Ouwerkerk focuses on the exercise of EU criminalisation powers, i.e. the creation of EU-wide criminal prohibitions (e.g. in the areas of terrorism, human trafficking, EU-fraud). It is for instance examined which grounds have been underpinning EU-level criminalisation of conduct under the Lisbon Treaty and whether, and to what extent, these grounds justify the criminalisation of the conduct concerned. The aim of this research project is to develop guidelines for the legitimate exercise of EU criminalisation powers.