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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 crossborder 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. «191 +
