Impact | Online advice about right to freedom of assembly

In the coming weeks the nominees for the Ben Feringa Impact Award 2025 will introduce themselves and their impactful research or project. The winners will be annouced on 13 May. This week: Noor Swart and Berend Roorda, on their online information initiative on the right of freedom to assembly, demontratierecht.nl

Who are you?

We are Noor Swart and Berend Roorda, we both work at the General Law Studies section of the Faculty of Law and we are associated with the Centre for Public Order and Safety. Noor works as a PhD student and lecturer and Berend works as an associate professor.

Can you explain what your initiative is about?

We built the demonstratierecht.nl (right to freedom of assembly) website, for which we received a €119,000 grant from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. Anyone can use the website to obtain free and freely accessible information and online advice on the right to freedom of assembly. As researchers, we strive to use understandable and not overly legal language.

The website contains an advice tool that provides free tailor-made legal advice to a protester, mayor, or anybody else who has a question about a protest, by answering around 25 questions. In addition, the website answers over 140 frequently asked questions about the right to freedom of assembly and it offers summaries of the most recent court rulings and a collection of open access publications on the right to freedom of assembly.

Which aspects of this research generate impact?

This initiative generates impact as it ties in with a specific gap in practice: freely accessible, clear, and legally sound information on the right to freedom of assembly for everyone. Demonstratierecht.nl offers legislation, court rulings, and practical information gathered in one central place. In doing so, the site contributes to legal certainty, increases awareness of the right to freedom of assembly, and helps to better understand tensions surrounding this right. As researchers, we sincerely hope that our website can contribute to offering freedom of assembly the space it deserves, without negatively affecting other rights and societal interests.

The impact of the website is noticeable from visitor numbers and spikes in these numbers with controversial issues on the freedom of assembly, such as in Amsterdam in the autumn of 2024. It helps that the website is shared on websites such as vng.nl (Association of Netherlands Municipalities) and rijksoverheid.nl (official government website) and that the site is mentioned during debates in the House of Representatives and in the Coalition Agreement of 13 September 2024.

What was your personal motivation?

Our personal motivation to develop the demonstratierecht.nl website was mostly our desire to make reliable and accessible information on the right to freedom of assembly more widely available. Protesting is a fundamental right in a democratic state under the rule of law. However, in practice, knowledge on this is often fragmented and difficult to find. We noticed that this raises many questions on the right to freedom of assembly: we receive weekly, if not daily, phone calls from mayors, lawmakers, police, protesters, and the media. As we are convinced that academia also has a responsibility towards society, especially on topical issues such as the right to freedom of assembly, we hope the website is able to bridge the gap between academia and practice. 

The project taught us to make complex legal language more accessible and easier to understand. The translation from theory to practice proved to be a challenge, but it was also enriching and it illustrated the importance of facilitating the spread of legal knowledge beyond the University walls.

Visit demonstratierecht.nl