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

Chapter 6 Conclusion: Towards a European Union Criminal Policy
1. A changing penal world
In the past decades criminal justice systems around the world have undergone significant
changes. As David Garland has suggested there has been a growing sense that the State
could no longer cope effectively with crime control by itself. 906 Thus, internally, the
State began to devolve some crime prevention and crime control responsibilities to civil
society, which became increasingly involved in criminal matters. 907 Externally, it began
to seek transnational alliances in order to face an increasingly globalised world with new
intertwined patterns of criminality between States and continents, which in turn brought
about new perceived threats that the States struggled to tackle alone. 908 Terrorism and
organised crime in particular played to this idea of the insufficiency of the State’s
response to crime at the national and, more so, at international level. Since the 1960s,
ideas of organised crime threats in countries like the US and Italy have travelled across
continents and played to the mind of the public, politicians and legislators. 909 Similarly,
both in the 1970s and at the beginning of the new millennium, terrorism led to a new
impetus in international cooperation and, equally, to a re-empowering of the State at a
domestic level. 910 This has had political and legal repercussions and has brought about
new tensions. In particular, in the light of these threats, academics, political actors and
commentators have taken opposite stances between, as Walker and Loader explain,
those who believe that Western humanist and liberal democracies face new,
unprecedented threats to their values and that urgent decisive measures ought to be taken
and those that, on the contrary, believe governments are reacting ‘selectively’ to threats
in ways that shake long standing democratic principles and rights. 911
906
D. Garland, “The limits of the Sovereign State”, supra note 1.
907
L. Johnston and C. Shearing, Governing Security, supra note 49.
908
Baker and Roberts note how globalisation has contributed to the promotion of some short-term
punitive policies, to the harmonisation of problems and responses and an acceleration of transfer
of penal policies across different systems. These common trends however do not imply that
globalisation will always have those effects across jurisdictions. E. Baker and J. Roberts,
“Globalisation and the new punitiveness” in J. Pratt et al. (eds) The New Punitiveness (Portland:
Willan Publishing, 2005) 122,136. See also D. Nelken, “The Globalization of Crime and
Criminal Justice, Prospects and Problems”, supra note 605.
909
V. Mitsilegas, “From National to Global, From Empirical to Legal: The Ambivalent Concept
of Transnational Organized Crime”, supra note 595.
910 K. Nuotio, “Terrorism as a Catalyst for the Emergence, Harmonization and Reform of
Criminal Law”, supra note 620.
911
I. Loader and N. Walker, Civilizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
2. See also L. Lazarus and B. Goold, “Introduction: Security and Human Rights” in B. Goold
and L. Lazarus (eds) Security and Human Rights (Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing, 2007) 2-
8. For a similar opinion on the tension between opposite fears brought about by the globalisation
of crime – mostly in the context of organised crime see D. Nelken, “The Globalization of Crime
and Criminal Justice, Prospects and Problems”, supra note 605, 253-255. For an argument
challenging the idea that the threats faced today are so unprecedented that they cannot be fought
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