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DEVELOPING EU CRIMINAL LAW
— SOME PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON 9 MAY
——o—
PÉTER CSONKA"
On 9 May 2021 the European Union has officially launched, in Strasbourg, the
Conference on the future of Europe. This process will involve much reflection on
what Union policies work well, or not so well, and may ultimately trigger a revision
of the Treaties. The Union institutions must take stock of what has been achieved
and what remains to be done.” Obviously, our future priorities must follow the
wake of our achievements but also deliver innovations capable of addressing new
challenges, in particular new crime phenomena and the changing needs of cross¬
border police and judicial cooperation. For example, the approximation of hate
crimes has no legal basis in the current Union treaties while extremist hate crimes
are on the rise.* Likewise, traditional judicial cooperation is being tested by the
post-COVID need of digitally exchanging sensitive information and evidence.
Developing criminal law and judicial cooperation in criminal matters has been
a key component of Union policies for the last 20 years, with its foundations going
further back in time, to the Schengen and European Political Cooperation treaties,
but also building on the Council of Europe’s innovative but intergovernmental
treaties. The Union’s current area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ) seeks
to provide citizens and companies with both security and rights, in particular
by ensuring an ever-increasing coordination between judicial authorities, the
progressive mutual recognition of judgments and judicial decisions in criminal
matters, and the necessary approximation of criminal laws, both substantive and
procedural.
Admittedly, much progress has been achieved since the 1999 Tampere
Programme: there is a robust Union acquis on cooperation between judicial
' Deputy Director at DG JUSTICE, European Commission. These views are purely personal
and do not represent those of my employer, the European Commission.
For an earlier stock-taking see Péter Csonka — Oliver Landwehr, 10 Years after Lisbon —
How “Lisbonised” is the Substantive Criminal Law in the EU?, Eurocrim 4 (2019), 261-267.
Judit Bayer — Petra Bard, Hate speech and hate crime in the EU and the evaluation of online
content regulation approaches, Brussels, European Parliament, 2020. https://www.europarl.
europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ST UD/2020/655135/IPOL_STU(2020)655135_EN.pdf.
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