European Arrest Warrant. Prospects

Abstract

Having appeared as an immediate replacement of the extradition mechanism for the capture and delivery of persons within the territory of the European Union, and as a response to the rapid growth of terrorism, the European arrest warrant (EAW) seemed at first a success story in the field of European criminal law, by being a tremendously efficient tool to combat transnational criminality.

However, based on statistical data, it is slowly but surely revealed that the European arrest warrant starts to be perceived as rather abused in its issuance and growingly limited in its execution, highlighting the lack of trust the executing states have concerning the issuing states, lack of trust based on various factors, including the issuing states negative history regarding the respect given to fundamental human rights. These issues result in a disproportion, a gap-zone between the past and future exponentially grown numbers of issued EAWs and the stagnant numbers of executed EAWs.

Alongside the European Union’s historical events that shaped the (dis)proportion between the issued and executed EAWs, like the inclusion of Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia into the EU, and the future withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, we also find that scholars and practitioners envisioned that the CJEU’s case law will suffer from the hidden vices of the EAW’s own success, as the CJEU put forward decisions that gave path for executing states to hinder the execution of EAWs in favor of the issuing states that are not trustworthy.

This way, building and clinging onto the case law of CJEU regarding the non-execution grounds of the EAW, the present Member States’ mutual distrust shapes a near future in which the execution of EAW’s most certainly won’t proportionally catch the numbers of issued EAWs. The purpose of this article is to study the gap-zone which primarily reflects the lack of mutual trust between states in the execution of the European Arrest Warrant.

Based on a deductive methodology and with the aid of doctrinal, legal and jurisprudential grounds we reach the present conclusions. In the absence of legislative intervention regarding the heterogeneity of EU and the lack of trust between the homogeneous regions we believe that inevitably a paradox is generated: the European arrest warrant will be limited by its own purpose and success.