The European Arrest Warrant: state of play and future of judicial cooperation in criminal matters
AFEE, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Private Law and Criminal Sciences and the Institute of Criminal and Criminal Sciences, invites you to refer the matter to the EAW within the European Criminal Area and the European Union and to discuss it with specialists in EU law, criminal law and representatives of the various national and European authorities or institutions.
This event will take place on 11 June (afternoon) and 12 June, at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of Aix-en-Provence. Registration details can be found here.
In many respects, the EAW is an observatory, a laboratory and a model not only of the European criminal law area but also a source of information on the EU legal order.
If one could think, in the early hours of the third pillar of the European Union, that it would engender particular mechanisms, as the conception of that pillar differed from the ‘Community method’ characterising the first pillar, with hindsight that first assessment must be nuanced, irrespective of the process of communitarisation. And this is not surprising because the EAW is based on or makes use of major concepts well known in EU law: mutual recognition, harmonisation, autonomous concepts, teleological interpretation to name only the most easily graspable.
The implementation of the EAW by the competent judicial authorities or national judges for more than 20 years, as well as its interpretation by the Court, uncovers the design, evolution and meaning of the EAW in the European Criminal Area. The structure of the case-law frames that instrument around the objective of speed, which must be reconciled with the rights of the person concerned by an arrest warrant. In so doing, the Court not only sheds light on the provisions of the Framework Decision but also closes its loopholes. In doing so, it shapes the impact of the Framework Decision on the powers of the Member States. This gives rise to a nuanced situation: by mobilising the concept of an autonomous concept in some cases and by referring to national law in others; in constant fact, the Framework Decision harmonises, while leaving room for mutual recognition, the Court of Arbitration or the balance of elements in tension. It seems to seek to avoid “prioritising abstract considerations (based on the idea of sovereignty) rather than others aimed at cooperation between Member States, inspired by the mutual trust that underpins the area of freedom, security and justice” (Lawyer General Manuel Campos Sánchez-Borona, Case C-712/25).
The balances thus drawn are at the heart of the vigilance points of the various ‘actors’ of the European arrest warrant. These are diverse because, if we think naturally of the judicial authorities issuing and executing arrest warrants, there are also judges, national or European, struggling with the conditions of application and interpretation of the Framework Decision, taken in isolation or in relation to other texts of the European Criminal Area, or the Commission, which intervenes in proceedings before the Court but also initiates actions for failure to fulfil obligations, and Eurojust. Representatives of each of them will share their questions or difficulties.
These balances certainly explain why the EAW serves as a model for mutual legal assistance agreements concluded by the EU with third countries. But it is also they who inform the so-called Petruhhin system and the central concept of a person who is objectively in a situation comparable to that of a Union citizen to whom it offers an area of freedom, security and justice. But while the EAW is a model, subsequent developments in the European criminal justice area reveal that one can go beyond it: some of its flaws are not found in later texts, while in others mutual recognition is no longer exclusively conceived between judicial authorities, or even seems to be diminished in favour of a transfer of proceedings to another Member State.
