This symposium considers the institutional foundation for the EU’s criminal policy, a highly topical and critical issue for the future development of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (‘AFSJ’). In the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty there has been a striking development of EU criminal justice agencies, transforming the prospects for transnational criminal enforcement within the EU. Those agencies now partly operate inside the traditional ‘Community‘ decision-making structure, including a greater resort to qualified majority voting in the Council and enhanced powers for the Commission, European Parliament and Court of Justice.
In the light of these developments, this symposium analyses to what extent the novel competences of the EU in this area and the stronger internal and external presence of EU criminal justice agencies has transformed Union criminal law from an ‘intergovernmental’ and ‘cooperative’ regime to one that is ‘supranational’ and ‘integrated’. In order to exploit the synergies of collaborative multi-disciplinary research on EU criminal justice, this symposium brings together prominent EU legal scholars, criminal law scholars, criminologists and political scientists to jointly reflect on the developments since the Lisbon Treaty with reference to transnational criminal enforcement by EU criminal justice agencies.
