Since their creation, the European Union and the Council of Europe have worked to harmonise the justice systems of their member states. This project has been met with a series of challenges. European Criminal Law offers a compelling insight into the development and functions of European criminal law. It tracks the historical development of European criminal law, offering a detailed critical analysis of the criminal justice systems responsible for its implementation. While the rapid expansion and transnationalisation of criminal law is a necessary response to the growing numbers of free movement of persons and goods, it has serious implications for the rights of European citizens and needs to be balanced with rights protections. With its close analysis of secondary legislation and reliance on a wide variety of original sources, this book provides a thorough understanding of European Criminal Law and the institutions involved.

European Criminal Law

This paper distills and organizes facts about cartels from about 20 European Commission decisions over 2000-2004. It describes the properties of a collusive outcome in terms of the setting of price and a market allocation, monitoring of agreements with respect to price but more importantly sales, punishment methods for enforcing an agreement and also the use of buy-backs to compensate cartel members, methods for responding to external disruptions from non-cartel suppliers and handling over-zealous sales representatives, and operational procedures in terms of the frequency of meetings and the cartel’s organizational structure.

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How Do Cartels Operate

http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/by/rey/leniency.pdf

The impact of leniency and whistle-blowing programs on cartels

The article presents a unique regression analysis of social-science estimates of the size of cartel overcharges. More than 800 overcharge rates were collected from a variety of published sources that have appeared in the literature during the last 125 years. A meta-analysis of overcharges from 395 cartel episodes finds that duration, legal environment, and organizational characteristics of cartels explain the variation on overcharge rates to a greater extent than the type of publication or the method of overcharge analysis. In particular, overcharges are significantly higher for durable international cartels and are declining as antitrust enforcement regimes have stiffened. Historical case studies and government reports calculate lower overcharges, whereas antitrust authorities arrive at relatively high rates.

Cartel Overcharges: Survey and Meta-Analysis

Deterrence will often fail because it falls into the 'deterrence trap' - penalties are either not large enough or so large they exceed the capacity to pay. Responsive regulation, by contrast, builds commitment to compliance through moral suasion backed up by tough enforcement action. Empirical evidence on the impact of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's cartel enforcement activity shows that in overcoming the deterrence trap, responsive regulators can fall into 'compliance trap.' The 'compliance trap' occurs where there is a lack of political and cultural support for the moral seriousness of the law it must enforce, such as is the case with much of the law relating to business regulation. The regulator can choose to nevertheless take enforcement action in a way that garners compliance by communicating the moral seriousness of breaches of the law. If they do so, however, their enforcement action will ultimately lack legitimacy in the eyes of business regulatees. Most regulators most of the time will end up taking the easy option of enforcing the law 'softly' or formalistically, and therefore ineffectively.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID930233_code353054.pdf?abstractid=927559&mirid=1&type=2

The Compliance Trap: The Moral Message in Responsive Regulatory Enforcement

EU Criminal Law under the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice

(2013). Representations of Governance in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Europe: The Iconography and Dramatic Presentation of the Sovereign Ruler. Law and Humanities: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 170-192.

Representations of Governance in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe: The Iconography and Dramatic Presentation of the Sovereign Ruler

Organized crime is increasingly becoming a threat to society as we know it and want to preserve it. Criminal behaviour is no longer the domain of individuals only, but also of organizations that pervade the various structures of civil society, and indeed society as a whole. Crime is increasingly organizing itself across national borders, also taking advantage of the free movement of goods, capital, services and persons. Technological innovations such as Internet and electronic banking turn out to be extremely convenient vehicles either for committing crimes or for transferring the resulting profits into seemingly licit activities. Fraud and corruption take on massive proportions, defrauding citizens and civic institutions alike.

European Regimes of Crime Control: Objectives, Legal Bases and Accountability: An Analysis of Intergovernmental and Supranational Methodology

This article analyses the European Commission's Communication of September 2011, "Towards an EU Criminal Policy", in an attempt to identify more precisely the nature and role of what is now commonly referred to as "EU criminal law" and to extrapolate some theoretical foundation for the deployment of criminal law at the European level. The analysis is framed around three major tensions in contemporary criminal law development�criminalisation versus soft compliance, security versus justice and rights protection, and globalisation versus local diversity�leading in turn to three main questions: why use criminal law, with what risks, and why at EU level?

The emergent EU criminal policy: identifying the species

In the history of international law and relations, ‘Westphalian system’ is commonly used as shorthand to describe the ‘modern’ paradigm of international relations based on a system of exclusive authority vested in sovereign State actors, and evidenced in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 The discussion here probes the way in which such ideas about governance took root and consolidated into a consensus among political leaders across seventeenth century Europe What were the means of intellectual exchange and political discourse which facilitated the Westphalian sea-change? This study considers some media which may have been exploited in a significant way in early modern European society for the dissemination of argument and ideas about governance Two major forms are of particular interest in this context: visual art, with its rich iconographical content; and various kinds of dramatic presentation capable of communicating with both elite and popular audiences

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Christopher Harding

Papers

EU Criminal Law under the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice

Representations of Governance in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe: The Iconography and Dramatic Presentation of the Sovereign Ruler

European Regimes of Crime Control: Objectives, Legal Bases and Accountability: An Analysis of Intergovernmental and Supranational Methodology

The emergent EU criminal policy: identifying the species

Who Designed the Westphalian System? Probing the Epistemology of the Westphalian Debates: 'Moses was but a juggler and King James the new Solomon'