Seeking a Methological Approach to Combat Transnational Crime: A Look at the Research Carried Out in the Jean Monnet Chair EUVALWEB

The Jean Monnet Chair EUVALWEB, which boasts the participation of eminent national and international scholars and practitioners, deals, among other topics, with the former cooperation in justice and home affairs (JHA), focusing on the internal security of the Union, as well as of the neighbouring and future Member States. This paper will deal with the JHA, that is one of the main areas that the accession states have to adapt to, taking on an external and foreign policy dimension of the Union. In particular, the fight against irregular immigration and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters have assumed a central dimension of the European space in order to safeguard the security needs of the Union, which are also projected outwards and into its neighbourhood. However, trends, which have emerged from our research, have shown a broadening of criminal offences as a result of the impact of European (but also international) law on national legal systems. Anyway, the prosecution approach to serious crimes affects the freedom and justice requirements, ending up being left to the case-by-case assessments of national judges. Therefore, the expansion of the Union’s criminal competence, via the additional harmonization of national criminal laws in the battle against transnational crime, and the establishment of ad hoc bodies and agencies for the coordination, prevention, and prosecution of crimes, actually conflicts with several crucial issues, such as the use of data obtained through the European Investigation Order. These issues appear to be caused by the lack of a “system” guarantee within the Union’s legal order itself, as well as the absence of European criminal and procedural rules, which inevitably force Member States, national authorities, and lawyers in general to firmly cling to the core values of their respective procedural and constitutional systems.