Abstract
We are happy to introduce the December 2023 edition of the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights.
This December edition comes out in the month that marks the 75th year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In this year, the conscience of humankind continues to be outraged by barbarous acts stemming from human rights abuses, extreme weather events, natural disasters, spiraling inequalities, and war. But the words of the UDHR remain a beacon of hope, confirming that even (or perhaps especially) in the darkest of times, it is possible to (re)commit to working towards a better future in which all human beings are entitled to rights and freedoms and considered equal in dignity.
As the year draws to a close, it is an appropriate time to look back on the year that has gone by and identify some of its highlights and main events for the journal. The main event for the NQHR was our move to open access in January 2023. This marked our publisher, SAGE's decision to make the journal a pilot in its Subscribe to Open (S2O). As a result of being part of this scheme, all author processing charges for the journal were cancelled and all the archives of the journal were made open access. In practice this means that authors throughout the world can now submit their work to the NQHR without paying a fee and readers throughout the world can read our articles without paying a fee. For a human rights journal aspiring to attaining a diversity of topics, readers, and authors, this is a fantastic outcome and we are thankful to SAGE that they chose our journal to take part in this pilot. As yet, we do not have a full set of statistics to show how the change has affected the global distribution of our submissions and downloads, but we will be monitoring these developments over the next year.
In terms of downloads, our statistics tell us that our columns remain some of our most downloaded pieces. This is likely because the Executive Board aims to make sure that they provide short opinion pieces on highly topical issues, which makes them eminently readable and also useful for teaching. We were proud this year to have four excellent columns: Aoife Nolan wrote on the cost of living crisis and human rights in March 2023, David Gomez Gamboa and Ricardo Villalobos Fontalvo wrote on academic freedom in the Inter-American system in June 2023, Alice Edwards, the current Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment wrote on the duty to investigate in September 2023 and in this December issue, we have a column by Antenor Hallo de Wolf and Roland Moerland, reflecting on 75 years of the UDHR.
Our articles this year have addressed some of the latest evolutions in human rights research, such as the treatment of ‘continuing violations’, age-based triage, admissibility requirements, reservations to European Social Charters, gender stereotypes, intergenerational rights, hate speech, human rights and the mental realm, and labour exploitation. The Executive Editorial Board takes great pleasure watching submitted articles travel through our submission process that is fully anonymous, so that the identity of the authors is withheld from them until after publication has been confirmed. Even the very best articles submitted improve as a result of our peer review process, which is testament to the quality of our reviewing procedure. We are very pleased to learn that of the authors who responded to the SAGE questionnaire in 2022, 87% indicated that they were very satisfied with the publication process. Although the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) emphasizes the importance of remaining skeptical about using Journal Impact Factors to measure the quality of individual articles, we were also pleased to learn that the NQHR's impact factor rose in 2022, by a figure of 0,8 – from 0,795 to 1,6. In real terms, this tells us that our articles are being cited more often and are forming the building blocks of the future human rights research agenda.
In this editorial, the Executive Board would also like to take the opportunity to say a big thank you to Elmin Omičević who has been the journal's Managing Editor over the last two and a half years. Elmin has recently ended his work with the journal, so that he can focus on finalising his PhD on the responsibility of EU agencies for human rights violations taking place in their cooperation with countries outside the EU. During his time working at the NQHR Elmin has been its lynchpin, providing invaluable assistance by corresponding with authors, organising peer reviews, and preparing the articles for publication. At the last board meeting that Elmin attended in August 2023, the Executive Editorial Board members thanked him for the commitment, time, and care he gave to the journal.
Elmin's departure means that it is also time to welcome our new Managing Editor, Naomi van de Pol. Naomi van de Pol is doing her PhD at Utrecht University's Law School on connections between human rights law and developments in neurotechnology, used to combat criminal recidivism. The Executive Board is very much looking forward to working with Naomi over the coming years and warmly welcomes her to the NQHR team.
As always, we want to take this opportunity to thank the members of our International Editorial Board who support the journal by carrying out peer reviews and taking part in our annual international board meetings, where they help us think through the journal's progress and challenges. The thoughtful input and support of these individuals is incredibly valuable and the NQHR would not be the journal it is, without it. We also want to thank all the peer reviewers who have taken the time to review articles for the journal over the last 12 months. We are always extremely grateful for the time that invited scholars take to help our authors improve their work. We also want to recognize the essential work behind the scenes of the NQHR that is done by its student Executive Assistants, Daniel Eggleston, Sikora Kloster, and Annabel Ashworth. Their careful work checking formatting, footnotes, and style is a crucial step in the publishing process and we are very grateful for their contribution to the journal. In addition, we would like to extend our thanks to the Utrecht University Library for providing the section on recent publications on human rights around the world.
In the tradition of the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, we will end by congratulating several members of our Executive Board for achievements and new positions in recent months. In particular, we would like to extend our warm congratulations to Jasper Krommendijk who took over as Chair of the Netherlands Network of Human Rights Steering Group in March 2023 and in September 2023 was made Professor of Human Rights Law at Radboud University. We also want to congratulate Surya Deva from our International Board who took up the position of UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development on 1 May 2023 and Chiseche Mibenge who took up the position of Director of International Research at the Guttmacher Institute.
I will end this editorial by thanking scholars around the world for reading the journal's articles and submitting articles to our journal. The NQHR's Executive Editorial Board is constantly grateful to be able to make the journal a platform for debate and learning in the realm of human rights research, and could not do this without our ever-expanding family of readers and authors. Please keep on spreading the word about our journal!
As an Executive Board, we are very open to receiving suggestions for how we could improve the journal or how we could do things differently. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have an idea!