Is the Belgian legislative position of retaining the leading role of the investigative judge in certain EPPO criminal investigations in accordance with the EPPO Regulation? In view of the wording of the Regulation and the preparations leading up to it at the European level, the answer can only be in the affirmative.

The EPPO will possibly have to handle procedural rights issues against the background of a national relatively variable geometry.

This case annotation on the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of 14 January 2010 in Tsonyo Tsonev v. Bulgaria (№ 2 - application № 2376/03) reveals that the case entails several significant and sensitive issues of fundamental importance, greatly exceeding the dimensions of the specific legal dispute:
- The enforcement of the final judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against Bulgaria;
- The application of the ne bis in idem rule;
- The interplay between criminal and administrative penal liability of the same person for the same act;
- The role of the interpretative activity of the General Assembly of the Criminal Chambers (GACC) of the Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) of the Republic of Bulgaria.
This article discusses these items and introduces the reader to the mechanisms in Bulgaria for following up ECtHR judgments, as well as a new approach to the application of … Read more

One of the most controversially discussed and unresolved issues in extradition law, namely whether extradition can be denied because elements of a fair trial will not be ensured in the requesting (issuing) State, gained new momentum after the CJEU’s judgment in “LM” of 25 July 2018 (C-216/18 PPU). This judgment relates to the framework of the European Arrest Warrant – the surrender system established in the EU in 2002. After briefly classifying the problem doctrinally and discussing the approach taken by the ECtHR, the article explains the CJEU’s line of arguments in LM. The analysis focuses, in particular, on the necessary test phases that the executing judicial authority must carry out in order to find out possible fundamental rights breaches in the issuing EU Member State. The article then analyses the reviews of this judgment by national courts. The follow-up decision of the referring Irish court is compared with court … Read more

The advent of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (“EPPO”) has been broadly welcomed throughout the European legal community, including by legal entities operating in the single market and their advisors. Even so, considerable uncertainties remain for these economic actors on how the new enforcement regime will affect them. These uncertainties stem from the fact that the twenty-two jurisdictions in which the EPPO will operate have in some cases radically different approaches to issues such as the nature of and conditions for corporate criminal liability as well as the substantive and procedural framework governing corporate criminal investigations. The fluidity with which the EPPO will conduct investigations across the EU, combined with potential unpredictability of the locus of an ultimate resolution or trial, will mean that these substantive and procedural divergences are likely to raise considerable difficulties, particularly for legal entities. The EPPO should therefore quickly establish guidelines on how to approach … Read more