A conversation with Jurian Langer, Head Legal Agent of the Dutch Government

And you've already made some references to it, but I'd like to focus now a little bit on the... your organization of agents in the Netherlands.

You already mentioned that there's an advisory department, litigation department, but maybe focusing more on your litigation department, which is where you finally settled in.

What is the overall structure of an organization of of this kind, which I assume it must have plenty of connections with other ministries, centralizing information, achieving a position of the Netherlands.

How does this operate in structural terms and also in operational terms?

If you look at it from structural terms, within the Netherlands, we have a centralized agent structure.

meaning that the agents, they are part of the EU litigation team that is part of the Foreign Office.

There's only one team consisting of seven agents, including me.

I'm right now the head of agents, so we're seven agents that represent the government in the proceedings before the European courts.

And The litigation is part of the bigger European law division department, which is also part of a foreign office.

So we have one centralized structure.

And there you see that's all how that's organized.

That's up to the member states.

And there you see the differences because some member states don't have a centralized agent structure.

Some member states, like Germany, have it divided up.

between ministries.

In the Netherlands, we have decided one agent structure.

And why now? There's this constitutional reason, because the Minister of Foreign Affairs, on basis of the Dutch constitution, is responsible for the international legal order.

So that's why they have decided this is all set up within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

That's on the one hand.

On the other hand, there's also a philosophical reason or like sort of logical reason for this because if you centralize all the agents together you also centralize knowledge experience that is the other thing litigating in the court of justice as litigating in the court of justice is so different from litigating in national proceedings And it's also so focused on, and particularly if you look at the criminal reference procedure, if you participate, if you're active as a member state, you're a member state participating in a dialogue between a national judge who has asked the questions and the court of justice.

And you bring in, you could say you have an amicus curiae position.

If you centralize your agent structure, and if you have a look at the team that we have right now, we have a team that has been together for several years, you have a very experienced group.

And I think if I look at how we litigate and how we are perceived by the court, and of course, my personal perspective, I really think that as a small member state, we have a...

We are considered to be a partner in a party in the proceedings where that always brings... a good legal perspective to the discussion, a well-thought legal perspective to the discussion.

Because if you have a specialized team, you also have agents that are experienced.