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Book Review: A Peaceful Revolution: The Development of Police and Judicial Cooperation in the European Union

Document Cited authorities 1 Cited in Related
AuthorAndreas Karapatakis
Published date01 December 2021
Date01 December 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/20322844211013675
New Journal of European Criminal Law
2021, Vol. 12(4) 622–630
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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Book Reviews
A Peaceful Revolution: The Development of Police and Judicial Cooperation in the European Union, Cyrille Fijnaut
(Cambridge: Intersentia, 2019), ISBN 9781780686974, 824 pp., €95
Reviewed by: Andreas Karapatakis, Queen Mary University of London, UK
DOI: 10.1177/20322844211013675
Much has been written about police and judicial cooperation in the European Union (EU), with the
majority of publications confined to particular subjects or specific time frames. In this book, Cyrille
Fijnaut aims at presenting the general European political landscape as well as providing a com-
prehensive review of the development of police and judicial cooperation within this context. This
timely book provides an interesting journey through the development of this area of EU in-
volvement and analyses the different stages of police and judicial cooperation since the genesis of
the EU, enriched with the historical events that mark each specific period of time.
The book is divided into three parts. The first is a historical background of police and judicial
cooperation. It contains two chapters (Chapters 2 and 3) that cover the timeline of police and judicial
cooperation in Europe up to the end of the Second World War as well as the post-war period until the
conclusion of the Treaty of Maastricht. In these two chapters, the author provides the reader with
knowledge of the origins of police and judicial cooperation from the emergence of transnational
crime to the cooperation between police chiefs and then to the neutral Interpol unable to control that
serious problem that has arisen at the end of the 1960s, namely terrorism.
The second part delves into the foundations of police and judicial cooperation at a European
level. It encompasses three chapters that concern the period from the Treaty of Maastricht up until
the Treaty of Lisbon (Chapters 4–6). Chapter 4 covers the Treaty of Maastricht and the Brussels
Programme. It becomes evident from this chapter that the formation of police and judicial co-
operation under the Treaty on EU was directly connected to the constitutional relationships de-
veloped among the Member States in this Treaty. In a period when European countries were
unwilling to surrender their monopoly on the use of force, their effort to include such type of
cooperation in the Treaty –as the author states –constitutes ‘a minor revolution in the history of
police and judicial cooperation’. That said, the programme is successful overall, given the pos-
sibilities offered by the Treaty of Maastricht and the implementation of the Brussels programme
(e.g. the Europol Convention, the Schengen Implementing Convention, the Convention on Ex-
tradition, the New Drugs Monitoring Centre).
Chapter 5 is concerned with the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere Programme. Despite the
fact that there was not a regular evaluation of the implementation of policies in the field of police and
judicial cooperation, the author succeeds in presenting a complete picture of the situation between
1999–2004. Notwithstanding the criticism on particular developments during this period, the

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