The evolution of European Union criminal law (1957-2012)

crime is a fluid concept, with loose boundaries and an ever-expanding nature, yet
specific and solid enough to be distinctive to the European Union. Euro-crime appears as
a criminality of late modernity, of a Europe that becomes ever more supranational and a
world that becomes ever more globalised (crimes such as money laundering or organised
crime did not pose such a pervasive threat in the nineteen century, if they even existed in
certain forms at all 375 ). As seen in the introductory chapter to this dissertation, at national
level, the boundaries of the criminal law have shifted considerably ever since the
nineteen-century. This shift was initially driven by the emergence, followed by a
significant increase, in regulatory offences. More recently, however, there was another
wave of expansion of the criminal law which involved new or newly perceived threats,
such as terrorism, for example. 376 It is to this new wave of expansion of the criminal law
that the EU primarily relates to. Euro-crime thus represents a criminality that emerged
mainly out of the nature of modern societies where things became more volatile - from
the movement of people between continents and within Europe itself, to the movement
of money through financial systems across the world or the flow of information on the
internet. These developments and common challenges created complexities and common
perceived threats that the EU sought to criminalise. Euro-crime has thus an intrinsic
relation to our times and to what Levi calls
“tools of later modernity”, such as “transnational air travel and communications,
internet and the spread of information about weapons construction, globalisation of
financial services and commerce including the arms trade and covert networking.” 377
Indeed, the EU seemed to focus primarily on crimes such as money laundering, fraud,
trafficking in human beings, drug trafficking, or organised crime. Article K.1 TEU(M)
referred in particular to terrorism, drug trafficking and other forms on international
matured as a juridical concept, because it suggests there is a genuine European justice system….
The only appropriate application of the term ‘Euro-crime’ is to crimes committed against the EU
itself, such as agricultural fraud or budgetary fraud.” M. Anderson et al., Policing the European
Union (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 13- 15. On a more restrictive note Euro-crimes was used
by D. Marty and J. Vervaele in the Corpus iuris project to define crimes affecting the financial
interests of the European Union, see M. Delmas-Marty and J. Vervaele (eds) The implementation
of the Corpus Juris in the Member States, note 368. Andre Klip also refers, on occasion, to the
crimes in relation to which the EU adopts harmonisation measures – or rather EU’s special part
criminal law wise - as Eurocrimes, A. Klip, European Criminal Law, supra note 15, 197.
Offences in the new list of crimes in Article 83(2) TFEU have also been referred to as ‘Eurocrimes’.
375 For an account of the different and limited shapes of organised crime in the ‘pre-globalisation
era’ see M. Galeotti (ed) Organized Crime in History (NY: Routledge, 2009).
376 J. Figueiredo Dias, Direito Penal, Parte Geral II - As Consequências Jurídicas do Crime,
supra note 48, 66; L. Zedner, Criminal Justice, supra note 32, 63.
377 M. Levi, “Organized Crime and Terrorism”, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner, The
Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: OUP, 2007, Fourth Edition) 775.
101