Inez Weski: The Rise and Fall of the Netherlands' Most Famous Defence Lawyer

Secrets are heavy. And their weight threatens to sink those who hold them.

Always dressed in all black, hair slicked back and dramatic black eyeliner drawing attention to her large eyes, Inez Weski looks more like the lead singer of a 1980s rock band than what she is: the most famous lawyer in the Netherlands. 

Last week, she was convicted of facilitating her former client’s vast, violent criminal network, refusing until the very end to divulge any secrets of his or hers that may have led to her freedom. 

The Lawyer Who Defended Everyone

From her large, wood-panelled office, filled with books new and old, on a tree-lined canal in Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands, Weski has defended former prime ministers and international mafia bosses, and was the principal counsel for the biggest criminal trial in Dutch history until she found herself on the other end, as a defendant herself, accused of facilitating the criminal network of one of her clients.

European Noir looks at the world through the lens of crime (real and fictional). Today, we’ll look at the Dutch justice system through the lens of its most famous practitioner, award-winning, book-writing intellectual Inez Weski. Who was just convicted last week of being part of that very network.

How she got there is a winding, surprising and suspicious route, one that implicates not just her but also the entire Dutch legal system.

Inez Weski was born in 1955 to a large Belarusian Jewish family in Rotterdam. Many of her family members were murdered in the Holocaust, a fact that informed Weski’s scepticism of an “all-powerful state” capable of endless cruelty. 

In 1978, she joined her sister’s defence law firm, where she stayed for the next four decades. They primarily worked on social cases, serving the underprivileged.  Over the years, they developed a diverse client portfolio–from asylum seekers to multinationals and foreign leaders. 

Inez Weski at her office

The Pitbull in a Robe

Known as a “Pitbull in a Robe”, Weski quickly developed a reputation as a fearless lawyer, unafraid to challenge the system and undeterred by the most notorious of clients. 

In 2006, she began representing Desi Bouterse a former president of Suriname who came to power in a violent military coup, against drug charges. 

Weksi also defended  Guus Kouwenhoeven, an arms dealer convicted of weapon smuggling and war crimes in Liberia. Another client was Theodor Cranendok, convicted of smuggling weapons to the mafia in Italy.

Her most famous and fateful client was Ridouan Taghi, a man convicted of running a criminal organisation and ordering six murders and sentenced to life in prison. His trial, known as the Marengo Trial, was one of the largest ever in Dutch legal history. 

The Biggest Trial in Dutch History

The Marengo trial was a massive court case involving seventeen defendants and dozens of lawyers, and it lasted six years, finally concluding in 2024 with guilty verdicts for all the defendants. 

The trial centred around murders committed in 2014-2017, allegedly by a Dutch-Moroccan criminal organisation, run by Ridouan Taghi. For years, Taghi was impossible to find until police were tipped off to his whereabouts in Dubai. In December of 2019, Dutch police and Interpol extracted Taghi from Dubai and brought him back to the Netherlands to stand trial. By then, he’d also retained Weski as lead counsel.

In March 2021, the trial officially began, with a 100.000 page dossier, the largest in Dutch history. [footnote about Dutch legal system]

The case primarily rested on the testimony of a crown witness. Crown witnesses provide key testimony for the public prosecutor, and in exchange, they receive reduced sentences and financial compensation. Judicial experts have criticised the excessive use of crown witnesses in Dutch trials. 

For one, there are many incentives for the witness to lie, not least of all, to avoid prosecution for their own crimes. 

Secondly, it’s almost always impossible to verify what the crown witness claims. Much of their testimony revolves around recounting conversations that often can’t be independently verified. 

Third, the witness and their inner circle may require lifelong protection as a result. The state often does not provide this. In the Marengo trial, a lawyer and a journalist were murdered who were working as the crown witnesses, but weren’t being properly protected.

A year later, in 2022, Taghi’s cousin, Youssef, who served as co-counsel, was arrested for helping Taghi run his criminal enterprise from jail. He pled guilty to the charges, saying his cousin pulled him into the cartel bit by bit.

During the trial, the prosecution showed video footage of Yousseff displaying messages on an iPad to Taghi, talking to Taghi, and then making notes. That such communication between client and counsel is meant to be highly confidential was bypassed. The prosecution also presented excerpts of text messages from Youseff related to drug trafficking, future assaults and bribery. 

The right to attorney-client confidentiality is apparently malleable to the whims of the prosecution. A former justice minister went further, claiming that monitoring of the detained should extend to their interactions with their doctors. 

And in the most Godfather-esque statements, when Youseff pled guilty, he told the court, “You don’t say no to Ridouan.” 

One also doesn’t say no to the Crown, as Weski herself would learn.

The State's Case Against Inez Weski

On a cold, misty Friday morning in February of 2023, an arrest team surrounded Weski’s home. Through the intercom, they tell her she is being arrested, and she lets them in. Several uniformed officers with weapons entered and hauled the 68-year-old off to an unknown location, which she would later learn was a Second World War bunker.

What follows are 42 days of a Kafka-esque nightmare. Held in a cell underground with only a faulty buzzer to reach the outside world, deprived of daylight, contact with her family, all, according to Weski, to get her to “flip” on her client, an attempt to turn her into the very thing she railed against her entire career, a crown witness.

The prosecution argued that Weski went beyond her role as a lawyer and acted as a communications channel between Ridouan Taghi, his son, and members of his criminal network while Taghi was imprisoned. According to prosecutors, thousands of encrypted messages and other communications showed that she passed information and instructions between Taghi and the outside world. The court ultimately agreed, finding that she knowingly helped facilitate communications for the criminal organisation rather than merely providing legal representation.

A warning to all of you about the world of detention, but in fact about trust in the supposed saving power of a government: never trust the good intentions of the State and its agents. You are alone in dealing with the struggle to survive, with the necessity of preserving your sense of humanity—or else simply rotting away.

Just a few days before she was detained, Weski was wrapping up her final arguments before the court, arguing that her client had been unfairly treated for years without ever receiving a truly fair trial. The judges ended the day’s session. 

When Weski asked if they could resume proceedings on Friday, the judges responded, “We’d rather leave Friday free.” Wryly, in her book, The Sound of Silence, Weski speculates it was “because her own detention was planned for then.”

Weski recalls one of the guards, on whom she depended for everything–water, medicine, arranging medical care for her diabetes–saying:  “Madame Weski, this can’t be happening. It’s not supposed to be like this.” To which she responds. “You see it. It is happening. It is.”

The Fate of the Secret-Keeper

In June of 2023, after six weeks of refusing to cooperate with police, Weksi was released and, for the next three years, she would stand trial for participating in her client’s criminal enterprise. 

There is no right in the Dutch legal system to a speedy trial; one of the things Weski has also argued is that long trials wear defendants out financially, physically, and spiritually, aiming to break them so they plead guilty.

The Dutch criminal justice system does not have juries. So one must convince judges. On the one hand, that is far more logical. They review a complex, comprehensive dossier, not a theatrical performance like the ones shown on. There is no Constitutional court or organisation to protect citizens from an overreaching government. 

“Was it worth it after 45 years, working six days a week?” an interviewer asked Weski before her trial began.

She smiled. “For my clients, yes.”

“And for you?” the hosts ask.

“I won’t say. But for the clients, yes. Luckily for them, yes.”

This is the fate of the secretholder. To hold the lives and livelihoods of so many others.

“There is so much that I cannot say, that I will not ever say. That is the fate of the holder of secrets. There sits much on your shoulders, including the lives of others. Others, others, others. That is your fate.”  

She uses the word “noodlot”, which can mean both fate and doom in Dutch—a fitting ambiguity, given the steady erosion of legal rights in the country over the years. What may seem like a superficial glance at a lawyer and a gangster is really about all of us.

Whether Weski is guilty or innocent may ultimately matter less than the questions her case raises. If lawyer-client privilege can be breached, if detention can become a tool of pressure, and if the state alone decides when exceptions are justified, then the issue is no longer Inez Weski. It is the balance of power between citizens and the institutions that govern them.

In the end, that may be the real lesson of the Weski affair: rights matter most when they protect the worst people.