Your registration
Upon admission, your registration is, in principle, valid for five years. Four to six months before the end of the five-year registration period you will receive a letter asking if you wish to renew your registration.
If you wish the latter, you will have to complete the entire registration procedure again. The Board of Court Experts intends to develop the re-registration procedure in the near future. This procedure will assess the continued development of the field of expertise in question, and the specific registration requirements applicable will be updated accordingly. In addition, the Board will consider whether it is possible to avoid re-registration becoming unduly burdensome and to allow certain elements of the registration procedure to weigh less heavily for experts wishing to renew their registration.
Conditional registration
In circumstances where you have applied for inclusion in the register and the Board of Court Experts finds that you have sufficient professional knowledge but not quite enough forensic legal knowledge and experience, you will be conditionally registered for a certain period: generally two years. During this time, you will be expected to immerse yourself further in your skills and to improve these techniques in relation to forensic-legal aspects; such as knowledge of Dutch law and of the action required of you as an expert during a court session. At the end of this period, you will be re-assessed to see whether your conditional registration can be upgraded to an unconditional registration. The fact that registration is conditional is not published on the website. Your name simply appears in the register.
Since February 2012, experts may enrol in a legal course intended specifically for criminal law experts working in a context. The NRGD has officially accredited two courses for this purpose. Experts may enrol in the Expert in criminal cases specialization course offered by the Open University/Maastricht University or Leiden University. Both courses devote attention to the structure of legal proceedings, the law of evidence, and various legal terms and tenets. The total study load for these courses is approximately 80 hours. If you complete one of these courses successfully, you will have met the knowledge requirement laid down in Article 12(1)(b) of the Register of Court Experts in Criminal Cases Decree (Besluit register deskundige in strafzaken).