European Criminal Policies and the Counter-Limits Doctrine: The Italian Example

Abstract

This paper describes some consequences of “effet utile approach” on criminal law embraced by European Union criminal policies and European case-law, emphasizing its inconsistency with the continental constitutional principles in criminal matters, and the fundamental role played by the Italian Constitutional Court; while this latter had placed the supranational law at the top of the hierarchy of the legal sources, at the same time it has progressively increased its power to control and limit the adoption of the EU law and the European Human Rights law the national legal system (s.c. counter-limits doctrine). The paper also underlines the importance of this “skeptical approach” on European Union inputs, especially after a recent and revolutionary overruling of the European Court of Justice.