Dutch former criminal defence lawyer Inez Weski delivered a tearful and defiant closing address at her trial on Tuesday, emphatically rejecting accusations that she acted as a messenger for one of the Netherlands' most notorious crime bosses. "I can only call it a travesty of justice. It is shameless," she told the Rotterdam court, which is expected to deliver its verdict on 21 May.

Weski, 71, is accused of participating in the criminal organisation of her former client Ridouan Taghi, the alleged kingpin of a large Dutch drug trafficking network who was arrested in Dubai in 2019 and is currently held in the Extra Secure Institution (EBI) in Vught, the Netherlands' highest-security prison. Prosecutors allege she relayed messages between Taghi and the outside world, and have demanded a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Weski denies everything, insisting her communications with Taghi's family were protected by lawyer-client confidentiality.

In a one-hour address, Weski and her four-member legal team — led by prominent defence lawyers Geert-Jan and Carry Knoops — mounted a sweeping challenge to the prosecution's case. The defence argued that investigators had selectively quoted from intercepted messages on Sky ECC, an encrypted chat service that was cracked by European police, while deliberately excluding exculpatory material from the file. They also contended that police had no legal authority to search attorney communications within that data, and that doing so repeatedly violated Weski's professional privilege. "The prosecution has piled error upon error," the defence argued, calling for the case to be thrown out entirely and, failing that, for a full acquittal.

The defence also took sharp aim at the circumstances of Weski's pre-trial detention. She spent the first nine days of her arrest at a secret location — later identified as the former Camp Zeist — which the prosecution said was for her own safety given the dangerous nature of the case. Her lawyers described this as unlawful and psychologically damaging, with Carry Knoops calling it the "Alice in Wonderland method" — deliberately keeping a suspect in a state of profound uncertainty — and arguing it amounted to a form of psychological torture. Weski, they warned, has since developed post-traumatic stress disorder and should not be sent back to prison under any circumstances, as doing so could prove fatal.

In a striking moment during her closing statement, Weski displayed prints and etchings by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, which she said symbolised the decay of the rule of law and her own experience of the justice system. Breaking into tears, she said the state had intervened "at the highest levels" in her case. "The law seems to exist only to be ignored," she told the court. "I can no longer trust the state." The Rotterdam court is scheduled to rule on 21 May.