Working method Legal Procedures

At any time, general questions about the procedure can be addressed at Legal Procedures. However, because of the fact that Legal Procedures supports multiple independent and unbiased committees, Legal Procedures does not compose any documents for (one of the) parties nor provide substantive legal advice.

On this page you can read more about the working method of Legal Procedures.

Statement

The staff of Legal Procedures fulfills the roll as the secretary of the aforementioned committees. By handling a case, the secretary is not accountable to anyone besides the chairman of the independent and unbiased committee. 

At any time, general questions about the procedure can be addressed at Legal Procedures. However, because of the fact that Legal Procedures supports multiple independent and unbiased committees, Legal Procedures does not compose any documents for (one of the) parties nor provide substantive legal advice. For legal advice, Legal Procedures refers to extern legal service providers. Such as a lawyer or a legal advisor, who can compose documents and act on the behalf of one of the parties during a hearing. However, this is not mandatory and, in many cases, not even necessary. Also, it is still possible to retain a lawyer or a legal adviser in a further stage of the procedure. 
 
The staff of Legal Procedures works openly and transparently, for example and if possible, by sending the parties all the correspondence simultaneously. 
 
Although the department Legal Procedures is hierarchically placed under the Director of Legal Affairs, the staff of Legal Procedure are led by a manager who is directly accountable to the Executive Board. 
 
To guarantee the independence of the committees, the advises are directly sent to the Executive Board, without any interference of other staff or representatives who have prepared the contested decision. 

Privacy and provided data

Legal Procedures handles all the provided data, in the context of the handling procedures, confidentially. During the procedure, this data will only be shared with litigants and members of the committees.
 
After a procedure, Legal Procedures will transfer all the provided data to the Executive Board and deposited it into the university’s archive. 
 
Because of the fact that the Executive Board is an administrative body within the scope of the Open Government Act (Dutch: Wet open overheid, WOO), the data can be requested by third parties. The Executive Board decides whether and in what way the aforementioned request will be met, whereby parts of the provided documents may have been made illegible – in accordance with the Open Government Act (Dutch: Wet open overheid, WOO) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Dutch: Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming, AVG).

By learning of a criminal offense, as referred to in Article 160 of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure (DCCP, Dutch: Wetboek van Strafvordering) (such as rape), the staff of Legal Procedures has the obligation to report this immediately. In consultation with the person who reported the criminal offense will be considered in what way a report will be filed.

Disclosure

Verdicts of the Board of Appeals for Examinations (Dutch: CBE) are anonymously published on the website of Legal Procedures (see: “Decisions”).
 
Advice of the Committee Scientific Integrity (Dutch: CWI) are anonymously published by the Association of the Universities of the Netherlands (Dutch: UNL), as agreed in Article 5.4 sub 18 of the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity 2018 (Dutch: Nederlandse gedragscode wetenschappelijke Integriteit 2018).
 
Advice of other committees are not published by Legal Procedures. As an administrative body, the Executive Board is responsible for actively disclosing it’s decisions, including the decision based on the advice of the committees. 

More information, such as the Regulations, is provided on the webpages of the relevant committees. For a more detailed view of the activities of Legal Procedures and the various committees, you can also take a look at the annual repports (see: “Annual Reports”).

The aforementioned webpages also announce who have been appointed to take place within (one of) the committees, as well as their secondary activities.