Dear readers, With the support of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the Hungarian government, under its six-month Presidency of the European Union, hosted a conference in March 2011 on “Protecting Victims in the EU: the Road Ahead.” The conference coincided with the ten-year anniversary of Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA on the standing of victims in criminal proceedings, a decade that has seen legislative developments for victims “on paper” but which has suffered from a lack of concrete action for victims in practice in a number of EU Member States. As research by the FRA on vulnerable victim… Read more

Dear Readers, One of the fastest growing needs in information management for global networks is cybersecurity and its related policies. The leading role of information technology and the growth of e-commerce have made cybersecurity essential to the economy and the operation of infrastructure systems. In the past year, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has been actively strengthening bridges with fellow EU agencies that are part of its “Justice, Freedom and Security” cluster. With its mission to protect information, ENISA has been called upon to provide insight, expert advice, and guidance to its fellow agencies in order to… Read more

Dear Readers, On the eve of 2011, eucrim can look forward to celebrating its fifth anniversary: the first issue was published in 2006. The idea for the creation of eucrim came about in 2003 at the Strafrechtslehrertagung, the regular meeting of law professors in the German-speaking world, where the development of European criminal law was discussed. During these deliberations, remarks highly critical of Europeanisation but supported by incomplete and misleading information were made, and participants complained about a lack of information in the field of European criminal law. To improve this unsatisfactory situation, I proposed in the discussion that the… Read more

I. Developing new visions and models for the cooperation and integration of the national European criminal law systems in the supra-national European context is one of the most challenging tasks for criminal lawyers in the 21st century. This new challenge is caused by the fact that European integration not only fosters the coalescence of European citizens and economies, but also an increase in trans-national crime. In a close economic community, it is no longer possible to deal with such phenomena of trans-national crime using traditional national criminal law systems, based on judicial decisions which are principally limited to national territory… Read more