Preparing the environment for the EPPO
| DOI | 10.1177/2032284417745226 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Author | Rosaria Sicurella |
| Subject Matter | Updates |
Updates
Preparing the environment for
the EPPO: Fostering mutual
trust by improving common legal
understanding and awareness of
existing common legal heritage.
Proposal of guidelines and model
curriculum for legal training of
practitioners in the PIF sector
Rosaria Sicurella
European Criminal and International Criminal Law, University of Catania, Italy
Abstract
The adoption on the12 October 2017 of the Council Regulation (EuropeanUnion [EU]) 2017/1939
‘implementing enhanced cooperation on the establishment of the European Public Prosecutor’s
Office‘ (the EPPO) marks a turning point in the development of the EU as an Area of Freedom,
Security and Justice, by the creationof the first EU investigating and prosecuting authority.However,
the structure andfunctioning of such a new body, together with the limited scope of its competence
established by referring to provisions in the Directive (EU) 2017/1371 – the PIF Directive – ‘as
implementedby national law‘, make the EPPO as an authority whose legalenvironment largely builds
on the national legalsystems. Therefore, the puttingin place of the new investigative body is farfrom
fully eradicatingin itself the various difficulties of judicial cooperation in criminal matters. Instead, its
implementation strongly revives the crucial need to foster mutual legal understanding and mutual
trust that the experience showed is not achieved yet among the member states. After shortly
presenting the main features of the recently adopted EPPO regulation, the article focuses on the
crucial need to r eshape training of all legal prac titioners involved in crimina l investigations (first of all
when dealingwith PIF offences) as the essentialcondition for the new Europeaninvestigating body to
function smoothly. The author stresses the need for improving mutual understanding of the different
legal systems and above all awareness of the common legal grounds already in place as the primary
way to boost the necessary mutual trust among practitioners and establish the first embryo of a
Corresponding author:
Rosaria Sicurella, Full Professor of Criminal Law, European Criminal Law and International Criminal Law at the Universityof
Catania, Italy.
Email: rsicurella@lex.unict.it
New Journal of European Criminal Law
2017, Vol. 8(4) 497–512
ªThe Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/2032284417745226
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genuine Europeanlegal culture. The articlethen analyses the main features of a proposalfor a training
curriculum based on an ius commune perspective recently drafted in the framework of the EUPen-
TRAIN project run by the Centro di Diritto Penale Europeo of Catania and co-financed by Olaf.
Keywords
legal training, Protection of EU financial interests (PIF), General Principles of Criminal Law,
European Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), Mutual Trust and understanding
Introduction: An EPPO is born. Let’s get ready for it!
The adoption on the 12 October 2017 of the Council Regulation (European Union (EU)) 2017/
1939 ‘implementing enhanced cooperation on the establishment of the European Public Prosecu-
tor’s Office (‘‘The EPPO’’)’
1
marks a turning point in the development of the EU as an Area of
Freedom, Security and Justice, by the creation of a new EU actor ‘responsible for investigating,
prosecuting and bringing to judgment [ ...] the perpetrators of [ ...] offences against the Union’s
financial interests’. Indeed, the first EU investigating and prosecuting authority has come into play.
However, the structure and functioning of such a new body, together with thelimited scope of its
competenceestablished by referring to provisions in the Directive(EU) 2017/1371
2
‘as implemented
by national law’, make the EPPO as an authority whose legal environment largely builds on the
national legal systems. Not only the way it is structured makes it to be deeply embedded in the
structure and functioning of national investigating and prosecuting authorities, since it will essen-
tially function through members of the national investigating and prosecuting authorities acting in
their function of ‘European Delegated Prosecutors’, constituting the ‘decentralized’ component of
the EPPO. Indeed, this solution could have resulted in the most effective way to set up an EU
investigative authority able to easily exert its functions in the contexts of the different legal systems
of the member states and relying on enforcing authorities established at the national level, provided
that effective direction of investigations and prosecutions is maintained at the supranational level.
However, this is hardly to be found in the regulation recently adopted. Indeed, at the operational
level, lying on collegial bodies (the Chambers) of three European prosecutors each, one of whom
will generally be the European prosecutor of the member state concerned by the investigation, the
latter’s role will probably prevail on the other two members with respect to the supervision of the
European Delegated Prosecutors and the coordination of the same directly running investigations
on the territory of the member state concerned. This risks to very much undermine the suprana-
tional nature of the European inquiring authority as it was originally conceived, since direction of
the investigation will presumably continue to lie on the national prosecutor of the State where the
largest number of offences was committed. More in general, one can easily denounce the shift
towards the national dimension of the decision-making through the progressive watering down of
the role of the central level, which consisted originally of a European Prosecutor, assisted by four
1. OJ L 283, 31 October 2017, 1. Only 20 member states agreed to participate to the enhanced cooperation procedure. Non-
participating member states, for the time being, are in addition to Denmark, United Kingdom and Ireland, also Hungary,
Malta, Poland, Sweden and The Netherlands. Any reference to member states in the text is meant to refer to the member
states participating to the procedure, unless otherwise specified.
2. OJ L 198, 28.7.2017, 29.
498 New Journal of European Criminal Law 8(4)
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