On 23 and 24 October 2025, the Maastricht Institute for Criminal Sciences will organise – in collaboration with partners within and outside the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University – a multidisciplinary two day-conference in Maastricht on ‘Truth and Authority in Criminal Justice’. The conference builds on the notion that – in both the popular and the scholarly debate – there is an increasing concern that we are living in the midst of a ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-factual’ society, which is essentially characterised by a particular distrust in public truth claims and in authority to be a legitimate public truth-teller. The goal of the conference is to explore how post-truth narratives and politics may influence and challenge criminal law.
The conference format will be a mixture of plenary keynote sessions and small panel sessions. Abstracts and suggestions for panels related to the following four subthemes are
welcomed:
- Conspiracy Theories and Crime;
- Technology as the authority in legal fact-finding;
- Criminalisation challenges in a post-truth society;
- Truth & Authority and the International Legal Order.