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

justice and home affairs matters under the TEU(M). 174 The meetings of the Group were
not meant to be an extra forum for discussion but rather a tool to unblock the
“…whole complex of intergovernmental and Community work in the field of free
movement of persons”, to draft a “report on the free movement of persons and the
establishment of an area without frontiers, including the measures to be adopted by the
responsible bodies and a timetable for their implementation”. 175
Finally, the Ad Hoc Group on International Organised Crime was created in September
1992 at a meeting of the ministers of Interior and Justice called for by Italy and France
after the murders of Italian anti-mafia judges in the summer of that same year. The
Group was established to fight international organised crime at an intergovernmental
level, and more specifically to collect and document the nature and structure of the
Mafia and other organised crime groups across Europe. 176 The group also agreed to
continue to collect data on the spread of organised crime, to establish a network of
contact points to facilitate cooperation in specific cases, to analyse legislation in the
different Member States in order to identify obstacles to practical cooperation and to
urge the Working Group on Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters to prioritise its
work in relation to extradition.
These fora continued to focus primarily on operational matters, particularly policerelated.
Indeed, as seen in the two previous paragraphs, Trevi III aimed at coordinating
activities in several domains of serious crime such as drug trafficking, money
laundering, environmental crime among others, Trevi 92 was dedicated to an
intensification of exchange of information and Trevi II was extended and put in charge
of the creation of a network of correspondents to monitor and exchange information,
particularly through a telegram reporting system in relation to football hooliganism.
Along the same lines, the Ad Hoc Group on International Organised Crime aimed at the
collection and documentation of the nature and structure of the mafia across Europe, the
establishment of a network of contact points and the identification of legal obstacles to
practical cooperation.
174 The coordinators group proposed that under the Treaty of Maastricht the existing ad hoc
groups were to be taken over by the ‘K4 Committee’ which would have a member of each
Member State and a member of the Commission and that would be divided into three ‘senior
steering groups’ which would have several working groups. The three steering groups covered
immigration and asylum, security and law enforcement, police and customs cooperation and
judicial cooperation, Bunyan, “Trevi, Europol and the European State”, supra note 147, 30-31.
175 Coordinators’ Group, “The Palma Document” Free Movement of Persons, A Report to the
European Council by the Coordinators’ Group, Madrid, June 1989, Section A(b), in T. Bunyan,
Key Texts in Justice and Home Affairs, supra note 141, 12.
176 Benyon et al., Police Co-operation in Europe, supra note 149, 161.
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