Jos Kösters
Mr. Jos Kösters is Operations Manager at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT). Until mid-2017 he was Director of Corporate Staff of Clingendael and responsible for inter alia finances, human resources and the secretariat of the Clingendael Board of Governors. Before joining Clingendael Mr. Kösters was executive director of the Netherlands Helsinki Committee (NHC), managing projects on inter alia rule of law, legal reform, human rights and prison reform in Central and East European countries and in Turkey. He was formerly employed at the Dutch section of Amnesty International and Oxfam Novib. He graduated in international relations from the Law Faculty of Leiden University (the Netherlands). He also has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
During the past five years, a substantial uptick in convictions for extremism-related offenses, coupled with the return of jihadists from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, drastically increased populations of extremist offenders within the prison systems of most European Union member states. Concurrently, several individuals who adopted violent extremist ideologies during their incarceration for offenses […]
Anjem Choudary, once accused of “poisoning the minds of the vulnerable” was released on licence from Belmarsh prison on Friday, 19 October. Prior to his conviction, Choudary and his extremist groups were thought to have influenced at least 100 people from Britain to pursue terrorist activities. His notoriety at the time was such that he […]
In light of the territorial demise of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, this report analyses the continued risks posed by IS. Given that IS is playing a long game, the report calls upon policymakers to keep up the counter-terrorism pressure, to sidestep policy fatigue at all costs to avoid undoing years of […]