Publications

When someone commits an offence, it is only normal that punishment follows his or her conviction. That this sentence also affects the defendant’s children is, however, often overlooked, despite of the emerging international and supranational (soft) law provisions on the matter and the rapidly growing body of research concerning the (negative) impact of parental imprisonment on children. With a view to filling that gap, this dissertation ...

Research indicates that almost half of the detained persons in Belgium would have one or more minor children, and that parental detention would have a mostly adverse impact on the wellbeing of the children concerned. Various international and regional soft law documents state that criminal courts should consider the best interests of the child when sentencing parent offenders. The Proposal for the reform of criminal law (2016) states that the ...