Development of criminal jurisdiction of the European Union

Abstract

The criminal jurisdictions of the European Community and subsequently the European Union began to develop as subsidiary competencies aimed at protecting economic and industry policies established by the founding treaties. Their development has pointed to the necessity of using forced measures for the preventing abuse and countering criminal activities in the area of the customs union and the common market. This paper presents the gradual transfer of limited criminal jurisdictions from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and communitarian law into the contractual competences of the European Union with an explicit legal basis after the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon. Using the teleological method, the method of the content analysis (of the legal norms) and the comparative method the paper emphasizes examples of using criminal jurisdictions within the framework of communitarian law, the delimitation of competencies between the EU and the EC, and the changes made by the Treaty of Lisbon in relation to the EU Treaty of Amsterdam. Amendments to the founding treaties have set the foundations for developing criminal jurisdictions into the supranational criminal law that through its norms would supplement national criminal justice systems in the areas of substantive criminal law and the law of criminal procedure.