A jury system should be introduced for serious criminal cases to reduce the gap between the public and the judiciary, says Wouter van den Bergh, deputy president of the Amsterdam court in Monday’s NRC Handelsblad.

The Netherlands is more or less the only western democracy in which citizens are not involved in the judicial system, says Van den Bergh. Special expertise is not necessary to determine whether a suspect is guilty and sentencing could also be left to a jury, he adds.
In July 2007 justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin dismissed a similar call for the jury system in the Netherlands.