On Wednesday, Iliass K. (38) was sentenced to life in prison for a series of murders in the Amsterdam underworld. That was not big news. “It is so often imposed, we have become mellow.”
According to the Noord-Holland court, Iliass K. (38) was part of a criminal organization ‘that was involved in liquidations full-time, 24 hours a day’. The Amsterdammer was involved in at least three murders in the criminal circuit in 2014. In one of them, the wrong man was shot, someone who had nothing to do with crime: a mistaken murder.
The news about that life sentence, the most severe possible sentence in the Netherlands, briefly made it to this site, but was not published in any national newspaper on Thursday. The report also did not make the eight o’clock news on the NOS. The Amsterdam city newspaper The Parool reported it in a two-column message on page 14. ,,Why is it no longer news? I suspect that we have become a bit mellow,” says lawyer Wiene van Hattum of the University of Groningen. Van Hattum is also chairman of the Lifelong Forum, which is committed to a ‘humane implementation of life imprisonment’.
Number of men in prison for life
,,Life imprisonment is now imposed much more often than before the year 2000. Then it happened about once every two years, now twice a year. Sometimes even four times a year,” Van Hattum knows. The Forum keeps track of the figures: in the year 2000, 10 people were jailed in the Netherlands with a life sentence. On September 1, 2021, there were already 42, they are all men. On top of that, there were still nine cases that had already been sentenced to life, but in which the suspects have appealed, not including the case of Iliass K..
Well-known life sentences are Willem Holleeder, Mohammed B. (the murderer of Theo van Gogh), tram shooter Gökmen Tanis and the Kurdish gang leader Hüseyin Baybaşin. The life sentence who is currently incarcerated the longest is Edwin Senff, he has been incarcerated since 1994 for manslaughter and twice attempted manslaughter in Badhoevedorp. “There are so many, you almost need a separate prison for them,” concludes Van Hattum.
In the Netherlands, therefore, no life sentence should actually be imposed
Rarely grace
For a long time, Dutch judges were very reluctant to impose life sentences because the sentence in the Netherlands was really life. Pardons were rarely granted before 2000. After the European Court ruled that this lack of any prospect was ‘inhumane’, the Netherlands established an Advisory Board for Lifelong Inmates. After 25 years in prison, it assesses whether the prisoner may start working on a return to society.
A commission of inquiry that investigated the functioning of the advisory board found last autumn that the number of cases on which the board must decide is increasing and that ‘parts of the new procedure are unclear’. Van Hattum: ,,In the Netherlands, therefore, no life sentence should actually be imposed.”
However, there seems to be a good chance that another series of life sentences will be imposed in 2021. For example, there are currently two major liquidation processes, including the Marengo process that revolves around Ridouan Taghi. The court in The Hague will also rule in the MH17 trial this year, in which four life sentences were demanded against the Russian and Ukrainian suspects.
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