The Europeanization of Criminal Law: Competence and its Control in the Lisbon Era
How is EU criminal legislative competence regulated after the Lisbon Treaty? The European Union has always had powers which affect national criminal law. Classic internal market judgments consider whether national criminal law measures are justified restrictions of freedom of movement. The Union s direct legislative powers in this field have developed more slowly through international agreements, Treaty revision and the case law of the Court of Justice on implied powers. This study asks what powers have been conferred on the Union in the field of substantive criminal law and how the exercise of its powers may be reviewed after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. The questions raise a wide range of issues relevant to EU criminal law, but also to EU constitutional, administrative and institutional law.
A state-centric view of European integration holds that EU criminal law powers were framed to preserve core areas of national sovereignty. Scholarship in the field of EU criminal law is often ambivalent or critical of centralized powers in this field. Addressing the Union s competence creep was at the heart of constitutional reforms incorporated by the Lisbon Treaty. This sentiment explains some unusual features of the field after those revisions: the emergency brake , the special position of the UK, Ireland and Denmark, limits to Court of Justice jurisdiction, the unanimity requirement for states participating in the European Public Prosecutor s office, more sensitive ex ante subsidiarity control, and limiting express criminal law powers to directives. Nevertheless, these limits are constructed from the reference point of EU institutional law. The survey of those elements shows that the foundations of these structures are unreliable. If codification was intended to limit creeping competence , the framers have failed. Case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union after December 2009 suggests that Article 83 TFEU, or even the complete set of legal bases in the Union s area of freedom, security and justice , is not an exhaustive codification of the Union s criminal law powers. The central question in the calculus, the Court s rules on choice of legal bases , has been susceptible to creative drafting and suffers from weak judicial oversight. Legislative practice suggests that the new safeguards can be sidelined in this process. Thus, the central, and important debates in EU criminal law on the meaning of specific concepts like minimum rules , what crimes can be included in the 83(1) list, and how the European Public Prosecutor should operate may be gradually sidelined by the incoming tide , or at least creeping competence in other estuaries. At the same time, Member States cling to pre-Lisbon practices that restrict the exercise of competence but which seem disconnected from the post-Lisbon legal framework. A detailed examination of this field finds anomalies in the external relations law of the Union, where pragmatism prevails. Small elements that have criminal law implications may be included within Union powers where express internal competence is doubtful. In others, declarations of competence appear to reserve powers to the Member States that the Union could lawfully exercise.
The Court now accepts ancillary provisions with criminal law relevance in mainstream measures that do not offer the safeguards of the express criminal law provisions. This is demonstrated by analogy with the case law on issues in the area of freedom, security and justice . Thus, social security coordination measures can be based on the free movement provisions, criminal law obligations may be part of the common commercial policy, and agreements on the treatment of suspected pirates may properly be concluded as part of an agreement that is exclusively Common Foreign and Security Policy. The Court even allows the EU legislature to predetermine the success of any legal challenge because it relies primarily on textual evidence in recitals to determine the aim of the legislature. Thus, measures establishing information systems and exchange mechanisms concerning road traffic offences are measures of transport policy, not measures concerning cooperation in criminal matters, and data retention is an internal market measure. These judgments have surprised academics, national governments, and even EU institutions legal services. Questions also arise as to the effectiveness of the new safeguards even when they are not circumvented. The emergency brake may lead to consensualism, but it is not pulled when a Member State position that is presented as a red line is ignored. The pleadings of the opt-out states in key cases suggest that national governments are not policing their opt-out. National parliaments rarely raise formal subsidiarity concerns. Intervention is rare even if an EU proposal raises constitutional issues and overrules significant policy choices in national criminal law.
National policy choices may be legitimate even if the Union has the technical capacity to overrule them. National criminal law scholars often argue that integration in criminal law will come at a high personal cost to the victims of that policy unless appropriate safeguards are developed. The Court of Justice has struggled to distinguish between criminal and civil rules in the European Union constitutional system. Instead, it has developed institutional safeguards that require, as far as possible, democratic decision-making. It has also begun to use fundamental rights, and in particular the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to test the legality of Union action. Thus, whilst its standard of review has been criticized in the past, the findings suggest the Court may be better placed to cope with the increasing trend to treat de facto penal law as administrative rules than the corpus of EU judicial review literature suggests.
This research has used standard legal research methods but combines these with an element of the law in action in the field of EU transparency law. During the research, it became clear that the key research questions required material that had not been published. In order to study the drafting processes, the study sought and obtained series of documents that were not originally released for public use. These include legislative negotiation documents, legal opinions of the legal services, and even the pleadings of Member States and EU institutions in key constitutional law cases. One document was released through litigation; another is pending litigation. Both cases raise novel points in transparency law that may have wide-reaching consequences on the nature of the EU criminal legislative process. To what extent should it be open to public scrutiny?
Should the Union consider strictly defined conferral or procedural limits to the enumerated powers? The history of constitutional limits is that they are circumvented at the first opportunity when a crisis presents itself. It is possible to conceive some which are more difficult to ignore than those which appear to have buckled under the strain of post-Lisbon practice. However, when limits are drafted in a strict form, this can later cause constitutional contortions that call into question the rule of law. Instead, the present criminal competence control has been effectively proceduralized: particular steps must be taken, but their review is likely to be unintrusive or sympathetic. More legal research is required in the pre-legislative stage, even to understand the nature of competence control. Debates in poorly studied legislative forums are likely to shed great light on the Union s constitution: what happens .
Journal/Publisher: University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law
Publication type: Article
Number of pages/Page range: 509
Language/s (content): English
Date of publication: 10-04-15
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Full name Samuli MIETTINEN
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