This article analyses the institutional role of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in the context of the European Union’s legal framework and underlines the nature of its prosecutorial and judicial authority in the Member States. Against this background, the author reflects on whether the current legal and institutional framework provides sufficient institutional safeguards to protect its independence and the independence of its prosecutors, both at the central and domestic levels. According to the author, institutional safeguards exist to protect the independence of the office as a whole, but they are not sufficient to protect the prosecutors. A significant legal vacuum exists with regard to their career progression and to disciplinary procedures involving them, but it is especially the appointment procedure that is not in line with basic rule-of-law principles, which guarantee the independence of prosecutorial and judicial bodies. Institutional safeguards are in place, however, as regards the dismissal of … Read more

This article examines the exercise by the Court of Justice of the European Union of its judicial review jurisdiction with respect to the European Public Prosecutor's Office. It describes the Court of Justice’s activities in the framework of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, of which the European Public Prosecutor’s Office is a key element, before examining the Court’s jurisdiction to review the legality of measures taken by the European Public Prosecutor's Office and a number of cases in that context.

In February 2024, following Germany’s “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz”, the European Union’s Digital Services Act, and the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, Canada exploited its “second mover” regulatory status by introducing its long-awaited Bill C-63. Through its Online Harms Act and related amendments, it proposed an innovative “systems-based risk assessment” model for regulating harmful online content. In this article, the authors argue that any truly “systems-based” approach will benefit from regulatory insights and prescriptions informed by the following two interdisciplinary sources. First, both constitutional and media law scholars endorse stepping outside conventional regulatory models by employing more “context-based” or holistic approaches—a regulatory turn seemingly consistent with Canada’s pivot towards an innovative “systems-based” model. Second, exploring further the synergies between law and medicine introduced in our previous Digital Iatrogenesis eucrim article, any enhanced framework aimed at “cracking the code” of digital media regulation will benefit from profound insights native to social medicine and diagnostic … Read more

In June 2023, the European Chief Prosecutor described the level of effectiveness of criminal investigations falling within the scope of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in the Czech Republic as low. This article aims to determine whether any data can verify or refute this statement. Incorporating relevant data from the EPPO’s annual reports and statistics from national law enforcement authorities, the author shows that the effectiveness of the investigations does not differ dramatically from that of other economic crimes in the Czech Republic. On the contrary, the majority of cases investigated by the EPPO generally record a higher clearance rate than the national average. The clearance rate of EPPO cases even further improved in 2023 as statistical data submit.

This article discusses the European Commission’s role in preventing and fighting corruption by means of its annual Rule of Law Report. The authors present the anti-corruption pillar of the Report, in which the EU Member States’ frameworks in preventing and fighting corruption are regularly assessed, and which outlines the Commission’s recommendations to all Member States in this area. In addition, the article describes broader synergies that exist in conjunction with other policy initiatives and tools, such as the new EU network against corruption, the Conditionality Regulation, and the Recovery and Resilience Plans.

This article is linked with the article by Iwona Jaskolska that introduced the new instruments protecting the cohesion budget against rule-of-law breaches (→ related link). It outlines the practical implementation of the two complementary but independent legal procedures: the Conditionality Regulation and the horizontal enabling conditions under the Common Provisions Regulation (CPR). They have been applied so far in relation to two EU Member States: Hungary and Poland.
The first part of the article analyses the Commission’s rule-of-law assessment of both countries and the Council’s follow-up with respect to Hungary within the framework of the Conditionality Regulation mechanism. The second part looks at the important restrictions on possible requests for reimbursement under the 2021-2027 cohesion policy programmes that were imposed in parallel against Poland and Hungary in accordance with the CPR horizontal enabling conditions on the implementation of the Charter on Fundamental Human Rights.