Miet Vanderhallen

• University of Antwerp - Maastricht university

The current study focuses on the beliefs and practices of Belgian police officers (N = 177) concerning suspect interviews. Enhancing and safeguarding the quality of suspect interviews can prevent miscarriages of justice, and a comprehensive understanding of the process is crucial. While prior research has explored suspects' perspectives on this iss...

Het gebruik van het zwijgrecht tijdens het politieverhoor: opvattingen en ervaringen van gedetineerden Het zwijgrecht is een fundamentele procedurele waarborg voor personen die van een misdrijf beschuldigd worden. Het recht is verbonden aan het recht om zichzelf niet te beschuldigen, namelijk het idee dat niemand gedwongen kan worden om aan de eige...

Over the past decades, the psychological science has accumulated a large corpus of empirical knowledge about police interviews, deception detection, and suspects’ confessions. However, it is unclear whether European police forces’ practices and beliefs are consistent with recommendations derived from this empirical literature. The study described i...

Middels een aangepaste versie van de zelfrapportage vragenlijst van Kassin en collega’s zijn de ervaringen en opvattingen van verdachtenverhoorders in Nederland onderzocht. Verschillende aspecten werden bevraagd, zoals de ervaring van verhoorders met duur, frequentie en het opnemen van verhoren, hun inschatting van het gebruik van rechten door ve...

This article is about the right to remain silent within Belgium. Although the right has always been considered applicable, both the courts and parliament have historically demonstrated a disinclination to define or engage with this. The right to silence is now formally recognised in the Belgian Code of Criminal Procedure, albeit with the classic di...

In 2016, Belgium introduced legislation mandating legal assistance for juvenile suspects. However, legal assistance can only serve as an effective procedural safeguard if it is provided appropriately. The current study examined how lawyers in Belgium fulfil this role in practice. Seventeen video-recorded police interviews of juvenile suspects were...

Notwithstanding that confessions are considered the “Queen of evidence,” how judges actually weigh suspects’ statements in reaching their decision remains relatively unknown. This study sought to examine how Belgian judges determine the evidential value of a suspect’s statement, specifically how they evaluate the statement’s: (a) admissibility and...

The shifting focus of criminal proceedings from the trial to the pre-trial stages leads to a changing role of criminal defence practitioners across Europe. European criminal defence lawyers are now expected to enter the proceedings earlier and exercise “active” and “participatory” defence as early as the investigative stage. Criminal lawyers, train...

Cambridge Core - Law: General Interest - Interrogating Young Suspects II - edited by Vanderhallen Miet

INTERROGATING YOUNG SUSPECTS: THE LAW IN ACTION This book represents the second and final part of a larger research project financed by the European Commission under the title Protecting young suspects in interrogations. This project – which is a joint eff ort of several partners (Warwick University, Antwerp University, Jagiellonian University, Mac...

INTRODUCTION This chapter describes the approach of the empirical study as well as the integrated analysis of the legal and empirical findings, which in turn enabled us to develop a set of proposed minimum rules informed by both law and practice. Providing a minimum level of effective legal protection for juvenile suspects depends not only on a pro...

INTRODUCTION In Belgium little is known about the practice of interrogating young suspects. Recently, the implementation of the Salduz Act has led to an evaluation study of legal assistance in general but the practice with juveniles remained rather under exposed. That evaluation combined a quantitative and qualitative approach, the latter consistin...

INTRODUCTION The empirical study carried out in the five jurisdictions aimed to explore the nature of the interrogation of juveniles. Its goal was to examine to what extent the practice lives up to the existing legal frameworks, and, where possible, highlight good practices in the protection of the juvenile suspect during interrogation. Merging the...

This book is the result of the second part of the European Commission funded research project Protecting young suspects in interrogations: a study on safeguards and best practice. The project consists of a legal comparative study, an empirical study and a merging of legal and empirical findings and its aim is to identify legal and empirical pattern...

This Country Report for the Netherlands has arisen out of a comparative study into police station legal advice, led by Dr Vicky Kemp, University of Nottingham. She received a small grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme to undertake semi-structured interviews with defence lawyers and policy officers responsible for criminal legal aid in six juri...

This Country Report for Belgium has arisen out of a comparative study into police station legal advice, led by Dr Vicky Kemp, University of Nottingham. She received a small grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme to undertake semi-structured interviews with defence lawyers and policy officers responsible for criminal legal aid in six jurisdiction...

This article presents findings of the research by Nelen, Peters and Vanderhallen (2013b) regarding cross-border police cooperation in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion. These findings are scrutinised in light of the conceptual framework of inter-organisational conflict (Scott, Austral Social Work 58:132–141, 2005) to provide an enhanced and more in-depth...

Scientific content analysis (SCAN) is a technique that claims to enable the detection of deception in written statements. The underlying assumption is that statements of self-experienced events differ in several ways – such as liveliness and concreteness – from imaginary statements. It is used in many countries as an investigative tool. Nevertheles...

This article discusses the recent European Commission's Proposal for a Directive on procedural safeguards for children suspected and accused in criminal proceedings and the protection that it offers to juvenile suspects during interrogations. Given the importance of the interrogations for the outcome of a case and its sensitivity for the personalit...

The importance of building rapport when interviewing witnesses and suspects is emphasized in many interview models developed in Europe as well as in the United States. The construct of rapport shows a number of similarities with the construct of the working alliance, which is already extensively examined in therapeutic settings. Despite the importa...

This training framework guide is based on the empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in four EU jurisdictions - England/Wales, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland - conducted in the period of 2011-2013. The study focused on three of the procedural rights set out in the EU Roadmap for strengthening the procedural rights of suspected...

Considerable emphasis is placed on the importance of building rapport when interviewing witnesses and suspects. Despite the abundant literature on the working alliance in therapeutic settings, however, few studies have addressed the topic of ‘rapport’ in investigative interviewing. Conceptual analysis revealed a number of similarities between the t...

The need for more consistency in sentencing is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in judicial debates in Belgium. The present study examines the desirability and the possibility of enhancing consistency in sentencing in Belgium. As in many other countries, Belgian magistrates possess very wide discretion in sentencing. Like most other contine...

Maatschappelijke veranderingen hebben niet alleen de klassieke invulling van de politierol in vraag gesteld, maar tevens de debatten geopend over de wijze waarop ze dient georganiseerd te worden. Het herdenken van de politierol van een autoritair, wereldvreemd instrument van de overheid naar een politie georiënteerd op de burgers, met een vinger aa...

In Belgium, police officers are obliged to attend advanced training in interviewing children. Research suggests training is not sufficient to acquire and maintain skills, but follow-up is also required. The present study aims to examine the influence of the type of follow-up (individual follow-up, collective follow-up and no follow-up) on the overa...

Het politieverhoor wordt beschouwd als één van de centrale elementen in het strafrechtelijk vooronderzoek. Zowel in theorie als in concrete verhoormethoden wordt de creatie van een goede werkrelatie of verstandhouding tussen verhoorder en te horen persoon opgeworpen als een essentieel ingrediënt voor een succesvol verhoor. Een goede werkrelatie of...