Weski convicted of aiding Taghi, avoids prison after 42 days

The Rechtbank Rotterdam handed down the Inez Weski conviction yesterday, finding the 71-year-old former criminal lawyer guilty of relaying messages to and from her client Ridouan Taghi while he sat in the high-security EBI Vught prison. The court sentenced her to 42 days, which equals her pre-trial detention. Weski will not have to return to prison.

The verdict closes a chapter that began in April 2022, when the Openbaar Ministerie (Dutch Public Prosecution Service) opened an investigation into how Taghi appeared to be running his criminal network from a cell designed to cut him off entirely. Weski was arrested in 2023, shortly after delivering her closing arguments in the Marengo trial, the years-long organised-crime case that ended with a life sentence for Taghi. Her arrest stunned the Dutch legal profession.

What the Inez Weski conviction means

The court ruled that Weski had become part of her client’s criminal organisation by passing on his instructions to family members and contacts. “She passed on messages, asked questions, gathered information and facilitated the network of Ridouan Taghi,” the Rechtbank Rotterdam wrote in its verdict. The Openbaar Ministerie had asked the court for four and a half years in April. The judges went much lower, citing Weski’s age, the loss of her career, and a decline in her health since arrest.

The court president was unsparing in describing the personal cost. “A grim end to her career, loss of reputation, and a decline in her health,” the rechtbankvoorzitter said in summing up. The judges nonetheless rejected Weski’s procedural defences. Her team, led by the Knoops legal practice, argued that she had been held in poor conditions at Kamp Zeist during the investigation and that evidence had been handled improperly. The court found neither argument persuasive enough to bar a conviction.

Weski, who has been one of the best-known criminal-defence lawyers in the Netherlands for decades, exercised her right to silence during the proceedings. Her team cited attorney-client privilege. The court ruled that privilege does not extend to acts that themselves form part of a criminal facilitation. The Inez Weski conviction is the second in a string of cases in which the Openbaar Ministerie has gone after lawyers it accuses of helping Taghi communicate from EBI Vught.

How the Inez Weski conviction fits the wider Taghi cases

Three Dutch lawyers in total have been arrested in connection with facilitating Taghi’s communication during his imprisonment. Two have now been convicted. Advocate Youssef T. received five and a half years for similar conduct, with judges finding his role larger and more sustained. The third case is still moving through the courts. Together they have forced the Dutch bar association to revisit how privileged client visits at EBI Vught are supervised, with new restrictions introduced over the past two years.

The Inez Weski conviction itself rests on what the court called a paper trail of coded notes, a dedicated mobile telephone, and later USB sticks that allowed information to move in and out of the prison. Investigators traced messages that concerned drug deals, large sums of money, and the grooming of Taghi’s eldest son as a potential successor inside the network. The Openbaar Ministerie has stressed that none of those messages improved Taghi’s defence; they served instead to keep his enterprise running from a cell that, on paper, allowed no such contact.

For the legal profession the Inez Weski conviction is a marker. Bar association officials have said in recent months that the trust between defence counsel and clients in the most dangerous cases has been corroded, and that EBI Vught visits now feel less like ordinary attorney-client meetings and more like supervised exchanges with adversarial security checks. Several senior advocates have publicly questioned whether they would still accept clients of Taghi’s profile, given the personal risk and the level of scrutiny the Openbaar Ministerie now applies to their own work.

Politically the case will continue to echo. The Tweede Kamer (Dutch parliament) has spent the past two budget cycles debating how the Marengo trial and its spin-off cases have stretched the resources of the rechtspraak (Dutch judiciary), the politie (Dutch police) and the marechaussee at the country’s most exposed sites. Dutch newsrooms have noted that the Inez Weski conviction is unlikely to be the last verdict from the Taghi orbit, and that the next test will be the third lawyer’s case, still on the docket.