Dear Readers, Breaches of environmental laws often cause substantial damage to people’s health and the environment. Unlawful pollution, waste dumping and trafficking, violations of wildlife protection, and illegal mining without development permission can have devastating effects. Moreover, environmental offences distort the level playing field for honest businesses and cause both direct and indirect losses to public finances (e.g., higher health expenditure). For the perpetrators, such offences are lucrative and for enforcement authorities not always visible while technically complex, which makes them difficult to investigate. For this reason, environmental transgressions – including environmental crimes – are on the rise. Given their… Read more

Despite countless challenges and obstacles, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) is working. This is no small feat. By the end of 2023, we had over 1900 active criminal investigations with an overall estimated damage of more than €19 billion. More importantly, in less than three years of operational activity, the EPPO brought to light a whole new continent of crime, as 60% of the estimated damage under our investigation relates to cross-border VAT fraud.

Dear Readers, Recital 5 of Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2020/2092 on a general regime of conditionality for the protection of the Union budget serves as a reminder that the EU’s legal structure is based on the fundamental premise that “each Member State shares with all the other Member States, and recognizes that they share with it, a set of common values on which the Union is founded, as stated in Article 2 TEU.” This commitment to complying with the Treaties, including the fundamental principles of the rule of law, justifies mutual trust between the Member States. Each and every Member State… Read more

Dear Readers, The Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), of which I have been President since 2012, was established in 1999 as the anti-corruption monitoring body of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe acted as a pioneer when it made fighting corruption one of its priorities for international cooperation nearly 30 years ago. Today, GRECO’s 48-country membership comprises the Council of Europe member states as well as the United States of America and Kazakhstan. Being a member of GRECO is a commitment to the proactive fight against corruption and other forms of misuse of power. Over the years,… Read more

Dear Readers, On 12 July 2023, after more than five years of, in part, very fraught negotiations, the European Parliament and the Council signed the so-called “e-evidence package”. This marked the turning point in the cooperation between law enforcement authorities and service providers. Criminal offences prepared and carried out exclusively offline are a thing of the past, which is why electronic evidence is becoming increasingly important for law enforcement authorities. However, e-evidence is frequently stored in another State and, until now, cross-border access to such evidence was often very burdensome, often resulting in possibly already getting lost and causing investigations… Read more

Dear Readers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us in many ways. One of the promising fields in which AI can be employed is in the fight against crime, as is spotlighted by a number of contributions in this issue, e.g. on AI’s impact on anti-money-laundering regimes or on the employment of AI to prevent cross-border human trafficking. AI also shows its immense potential when applied in the field of forensic analysis, where robots equipped with advanced imaging and analysis capabilities can assist. They are not only capable of processing evidence, collecting fingerprints, analysing DNA samples, and performing… Read more