Deviations from and Alternatives to the Community Method in Justice and Home Affairs

Abstract

Although only formally introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993, the domain of EU justice and home affairs (JHA) has become the most rapidly expanding EU policy-making domain of this decade. Since the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force in 1999 — regrouping the JHA fields under the fundamental treaty objective of creating an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (AFSJ)1 — the JHA Council has adopted well over a hundred new texts every year, with 164 in 2007 alone.2 Over the same period, a range of new JHA-related institutions and structures — Eurojust and Frontex being the most prominent examples — have been created. Moreover, the budget available for JHA measures has increased more than tenfold and no other policy domain has seen such proliferation of multi-annual action plans — the most notable example being the Action Plan on Combating Terrorism, with over 200 individual measures.