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mr. dr. Nicky Touw

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Criminal Law

Assistant Professor, Kooijmans Institute

Assistant Professor, Research Programmes - Law, Empirical and Normative Studies

Personal information

Since February 2026, Nicky Touw is an Assistant Professor in the Criminal Law Department at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on serious human rights violations and international crimes occurring within corporate value chains.

Previously, she was affiliated with the International and European Law department at the Open Universiteit as a PhD candidate (Dec. 2019 – June 2025) and Assistant Professor (June 2025 – Feb. 2026). During that period, she also held a visiting appointment at the Criminal Law Section of the University of Amsterdam and was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (Sept. – Dec. 2022).

Touw obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (2009), and both a Bachelor’s degree in Law (2013, cum laude) and a Master’s degree in Criminal Law (2014) from the University of Amsterdam. She gained professional experience in corporate criminal law while working as a paralegal and lawyer.

Research

Touw is interested in the general question of how the law can regulate any negative impact of business activities. This question is pressing because the complex transnational structures of enterprises within the global economy create a lack of transparency that hinders enforcement. While legislation therefore obliges companies themselves to create transparency, significant questions remain regarding the legal, normative, and practical limits and possibilities of such legislation. Touw focusses specifically on the EU Green Deal.

In her doctoral thesis (supervised by Prof. Göran Sluiter and Prof. Gleider Hernandez), Touw examined the role of transparency in regulating serious human rights violations and international crimes occurring within corporate value chains, from an international human rights law perspective. Based on this analysis, she constructed a normative framework regarding access to evidence in private law litigation against multinational corporations as a site for the creation of transparency.

Touw’s current research builds upon and expands this normative framework by investigating the role of corporate reporting and due diligence obligations in the prosecutions of companies for their involvement in crimes linked to resource extraction in conflict affected areas. Given the various EU Green Deal instruments and the diverse range of civil, administrative, and criminal enforcement mechanisms, it is essential to further examine the limits and possibilities of transparency obligations in this specific context.

Teaching

Touw teaches in the Bachelor’s programmes in Law and ‘Law in Society’, as well as the Master’s programme in Criminal Law. In her teaching, she aims to foster a critical mindset among students and instill in them the importance of looking beyond the boundaries of a single legal field.

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