The Trevi Group

Early traces of internal security cooperation can be found in the Naples Convention of 1967, agreed between the six founding European Economic Community (EEC) member states (‘the Six’) to deal with customs cooperation. This cooperation was p. 289↵closely linked to the common market because it sought to combat infringements of national customs legislation. Cooperation moved to a different level when member states sought greater coordination in their responses to domestic groups defined as terrorist organizations, such as Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) in Spain, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland. National governments sought to cooperate within the Trevi Group, which was set up in 1976 by the then nine member states to promote cooperation between police, security, and intelligence agencies. There are various explanations given for the name ‘Trevi’: one is that it is an acronym derived from its focus on Terrorisme, radicalisme, extrémisme et violence internationale; another is that it is named after the Trevi Fountain in Rome, near which the group first met. Whichever is the case, the key point is that Trevi created patterns and habits of cooperation on internal security to highlight the importance of regular interactions that link internal security officials in member states.

The political leadership and direction for Trevi was set by meetings every six months of interior ministers from the nine member states. This kind of political steering by national ministers is a key feature of EU decision-making, but cannot provide policy and operational details. Consequently, to prepare for these ministerial meetings, senior officials from each member state would meet in May and November—that is, one month before the meeting of ministers. There was also another layer beneath this senior official level, because the detailed groundwork for these higher-level meetings was actually done in working groups. Three such groups were created in 1976. So-called Trevi I focused on anti-terrorism; Trevi II, on police training, including measures to combat football-related violence. A third group dealing with civilian air travel, Trevi III, was largely inert and was redefined in 1985 to focus on serious organized crime, after which it became more active. Two other groups (nuclear safety and civil emergencies) were created, but never actually met. Associated with the work of Trevi in the sense of being kept informed about developments were the ‘friends of Trevi’: Austria, Canada, Finland, Morocco, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States (US).

Early cooperation centred on anti-terrorism, police training, and serious organized crime. Methods of cooperation emerged outside of the formal Treaty framework and were ‘transgovernmental’, with actors defined by their operation in the field of internal security policy meeting frequently and developing patterns of working. These interactions qualify the idea of a supranational versus intergovernmental dichotomy positing either supranational institutions or the member states, respectively, as being in the driving seat. Transgovernmental interactions are ‘sectoral’ in that they focus on the specialized function of internal security questions and involve groups of people—officials from national and EU institutions plus people from security agencies—who meet regularly to exchange information and ideas, and may not be directly under the control of cabinets and prime ministers. This distinction does not mean that officials act contrary to the policies or interests of their governments, but can mean that they develop common understandings that shape how p. 290↵problems are understood in the first place, which can then influence how responses develop. Working groups provided a base for interaction and the development of shared understandings between national officials, which, in turn, helped to reshape the context within which planning and decision-making occurred. Member states did not cede responsibility to common institutional processes, but made evident their willingness to work together.

The impact of single market integration

Did the SEA plan to create a European single market—defined as an area without internal frontiers within which people, services, goods, and capital could move freely—also have the effect of impelling cooperation on internal security? There are important linkages between economic integration and internal security cooperation, but there was also a determination that internal security cooperation would occur outside of the Treaty framework, in transgovernmental forums with limited involvement by supranational institutions.

The key development during the 1980s occurred outside of the Treaty framework and prior to the SEA. In June 1985, the Schengen Agreement was signed by Belgium, France, (West) Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands in a riverboat on the River Mosel near to the town of Schengen in Luxembourg. The location was symbolic, because it is where the borders of Luxembourg, Germany, and France meet. The Schengen Agreement marked an ambitious move by five EC member states with a long-standing commitment to deeper political integration. The Schengen Agreement provided for the abolition of border controls between participating states, common rules on migration, asylum, and visas, and the creation of a database—the Schengen Information System (SIS)—to bring together information held in national databases on individuals and property. In 1990, the Schengen Implementing Convention, agreed by the same five states, sought to effect these agreed measures. Monar (2001) has argued that Schengen provided a ‘laboratory’ for the member states, demonstrating to them the internal security implications of free movement. In May 2005, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain reached agreement in the Prüm Treaty to step up cooperation in tackling cross-border crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism, by providing reciprocal access to the DNA profiles, fingerprints, and vehicle registration data of participating states (Grabbe 2000; Pastore et al. 2006). The Prüm Treaty was signed before the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions for ‘enhanced cooperation’ came into effect. But Prüm (as Schengen did before it) foreshadowed the enhanced cooperation under which a third or more of EU member states can pursue cooperation as long as it does not discriminate against other member states, furthers Treaty objectives, and is not an area that falls within the EU’s exclusive competence.

The Amsterdam Treaty imported the Schengen acquis directly into the EU. This move points towards the importance of secluded and secretive venues outside of the Treaty framework for the development of measures that are then ‘imported’ to form p. 291↵part of the EU acquis. By 1997, when the Amsterdam Treaty was agreed, all member states except Ireland and the UK had signed the Schengen Agreement.

Informal transgovernmental cooperation in the 1980s

Single market integration also affected the Trevi Group, which initially focused on terrorism and police training. Over time, its role was developed in light of the creation of the single market and the security issues that were seen to be arising as a result of this deeper level of economic integration, which would require the dismantling of internal frontiers. The ‘Trevi 92’ group worked with an ad hoc group on immigration (created in 1986) to consider the security implications of single market integration. A group of coordinators was established in 1988, consisting of senior officials from each member state, which produced the Palma document that detailed the internal security measures that were seen as necessary to ‘compensate’ for single-market liberalization.

The ad hoc group on immigration drafted the Dublin Convention (1990), which is the framing document of the European asylum system, and which created key ideas and approaches that have informed policy development since. The right to asylum is protected by the Geneva Convention of 1951, Article 1 of which seeks to protect anyone who:

… owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

At the core of the Dublin system is the idea that an asylum application be made in the first country that is entered by the applicant. Any decision made in this first country of entry is final and binding for other member states. This rule means that the European asylum system is supposed to be a ‘one-stop’ system designed to prevent ‘asylum shopping’, with applicants moving from one member state to another (Kaunert and Léonard 2012). In the face of large-scale flows from Syria, the German government stated that it would consider asylum applications from Syrians irrespective of where they entered the EU. This decision led hundreds of thousands of people to embark on journeys across south-east Europe in an attempt to reach Germany. The decision also undermined the Dublin asylum system because Germany was prepared to consider the claims of applicants that had arrived in other EU member states in which their claims technically should have been made. The Eurodac system—that is, the European fingerprint database—supports implementation of the Dublin Convention (and its successor, the Dublin II Regulation of 2003). These formed part of the Common European Asylum System developed by 2003 and then further revised through common EU measures by 2013 (Monar 2014).

p. 292↵The context for the development of the Dublin system was the increase in asylum that occurred in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, particularly to Germany. As with the Syrian refugee crisis, we see concerns about the sharing of responsibility, but also a lack of solidarity between member states. In both the early 1990s and in 2014–15, Germany was concerned that other member states were not ready to embrace the sharing of responsibility or of solidarity through, for example, the distribution of asylum seekers and refugees in a more proportional way across the EU.

The Maastricht Treaty and the challenges of a wider Europe

The end of the Cold War provided further impetus to the development of EU internal security cooperation. We also begin to see, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, how security issues were redefined, with a move from the state security framework that had prevailed during the Cold War towards a new focus on societal security and associated ‘threats’, such as immigration, asylum, and transnational organized crime, which also cut across the traditional distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ security. Institutional form and decision-making processes were heavily influenced by the patterns of interaction and cooperation created in the 1970s, and by the key role played in these by interior ministries and internal security agencies.

The 1990s saw some fairly apocalyptic predictions of large-scale migration or rampant organized crime from Eastern Europe. Some argued that as many as 25 million people might move from East to West, although the actual number was about 10 per cent of that figure (Codagnone 1999). The key point is that these forecasts of the potential scale of the threat or challenge had important effects on perceptions of internal security and were used as a rationale for strengthened EU-level action to deal with these perceived threats.

The institutional response was the JHA pillar of the Maastricht Treaty. This step was a compromise measure that sought to reconcile states that were firmly opposed to supranational action on issues such as migration and asylum, such as the UK, with those member states, such as Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, which were more open to the idea of common policy-making on such issues at EU level. The intergovernmental JHA pillar allowed member states to cooperate in nine areas of ‘common interest’ (see Box 12.2)—that is, areas in which common policies were to be developed. There would also be limited involvement by supranational institutions, with the Commission only loosely associated with policy development, and the EP and Court of Justice largely excluded.

The Maastricht Treaty brought together within the JHA pillar a variety of issues, some of which were issues on which member states had been working together since the late 1960s. It formalized this cooperation, but did so in a way that severelyp. 293↵

limited involvement by supranational institutions, and also placed constraints on legal and political accountability at either national or EU levels (Geddes 2008).

Authority was delegated to a complex five-tier structure comprising the JHA Council, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), the K4 Committee of senior officials (named after the relevant Treaty Article), steering groups, and working groups. This set-up was later amended to a four-tier structure during the UK presidency in 1998, when steering groups were abolished. Even so, the structures were complex and opaque.

Decisions were to be made by unanimity in the JHA Council, which would be supported by Coreper and the K4 Committee. The K4 Committee and the working groups brought working methods established in the Trevi Group into the EU. Under the JHA pillar, the Commission shared the right of initiative with the member states. A JHA portfolio was created within the then Directorate-General (DG) for Social Affairs. The EP had the right only to be ‘regularly informed’ of developments and ‘consulted’ about decisions, while the Court of Justice of the EU had no mandatory jurisdiction over the JHA pillar.

The legal outputs that were possible from the JHA pillar were also very limited in their scope. There was no provision for issuing regulations or directives under the JHA pillar; instead, member states had to rely on other types of instrument. Joint positions and joint actions could define the EU’s approach to a particular issue, while conventions in international law could be agreed, which would then need to bep. 294↵

ratified in accordance with constitutional procedures in each member state. Three such conventions were agreed: Schengen; Dublin (dealing with asylum); and Rome (creating Europol—see Box 12.3). All took a long time to move from agreement to ratification. The process of ratification of the Schengen Agreement was delayed by the implications of German reunification, while Dublin took seven years to move from signature to ratification.

The Amsterdam Treaty

The Amsterdam Treaty was designed to tackle some of the inadequacies of the Maastricht ‘pillar’ framework. The Maastricht Treaty was an uneasy compromise born more of the need to strike a deal than of considered reflection on the best way in which to tackle perceived new security challenges. At the most basic level, it seemed that the Maastricht framework did not provide the member states with the tools needed to do the job. For example, the inability to use the Community decision-making method inhibited the effectiveness of cooperation, as demonstrated by the difficulty securing ratification of conventions agreed in international law. Opaqueness and difficulties in holding decision-makers to account were seen as exacerbating the democratic deficit.

During the Amsterdam negotiations, a core group of member states were prepared to see fuller incorporation of internal security issues within the Community, but others, such as the UK and Denmark, were not prepared to take such a step. The p. 295↵solution, as will be seen, was the use of ‘flexibility’ in the Treaty framework, which allowed the UK, Ireland, and Denmark to opt out of measures on free movement, immigration, and asylum. The UK and Ireland were not Schengen members, while Denmark was. This move can be understood as partial communitarization that extended further powers to the Commission and the Court, but with constraints on decision-making, such as continued use of majority voting in the Council until at least five years after the Treaty came into force.

A key feature of the Amsterdam Treaty was the new Title IV added to the Treaty framework. It brought free movement, migration, asylum, checks at external borders, protection of the rights of nationals of non-member countries (known as third-country nationals, or TCNs), and judicial cooperation in civil matters into the scope of the Community method of decision-making. The Council remained the key decision-maker for five years following ratification of the Treaty (until 2004). This meant that:

The Court of Justice also saw its competences extended to cover Title IV matters, but only following a reference from the highest court of appeal in a member state. This provision constrained the Court of Justice’s role in making rulings based on preliminary references from tribunals in member states seeking to apply Community law.

The European Commission did not exercise jurisdiction over the JHA pillar. After 2004, the Commission had sole right of initiative in Title IV (just as in other Community areas of competence) and, following unanimous agreement by the Council, the codecision and qualified majority voting (QMV) procedures could be applied. The ‘Return’ Directive of 2008,² covering expulsion of irregular migrants, was the first measure to be adopted using codecision (renamed under the Lisbon Treaty as the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’, or OLP).

Objections from the UK and Ireland were accommodated within a protocol added to the Treaty, which made it clear that the two countries were not covered by measures under Title IV and could not be bound by decisions made by other member states. Both countries could, however, opt in to proposals. The protocol was added because the UK and Ireland reserved the right to impose controls on those entering their territory, while other member states within ‘Schengenland’ were removing such controls. Ireland was keen to participate so far as possible with Title IV measures, while maintaining its common travel area with the UK. The UK government, too, opted into a range of Title IV measures, including all key asylum measures (Papagianni 2001; Geddes 2005; Adler-Nissen 2009a) pre-Brexit. The UK has actually seen the benefits of EU-level action on those forms of migration that its policies have defined as unwanted (asylum seekers and irregular migrants), while not p. 296↵participating in those measures that are were potentially rights-extending (such as the 2003 directive that extended rights equivalent to EU citizens for TCNs legally resident in the Union for a period of five years or more³) or measures that impinged on the ability to exercise border controls at the UK’s frontier. The government of Denmark also chose not to be covered by Title IV measures. Its position was different because it is a Schengen member state. But governments of a more Eurosceptic and anti-immigration hue were keen to be able to decide whether or not to implement decisions agreed under Title IV in national law that built on the Schengen framework.

The JHA pillar dealt with provisions on JPC in criminal matters, which included racism and xenophobia, terrorism, trafficking in persons and offences against children, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and corruption and fraud. The aim here was to promote closer cooperation, although the institutional mechanisms for doing so were weak. The instruments for policy action remained joint positions, decisions, framework decisions, and conventions.

In 1999, a DG JHA was established within the Commission that, by 2010, employed more than 600 staff. In 2010, the remit of the DG was split into two, with one new DG dealing with home affairs and another with justice. Viviane Reding, the first Justice Commissioner, made a big impact in her new role in 2010 when she labelled plans to round up and deport Roma from France to Romania ‘a disgrace’, and issued a letter of formal notice to the French government requesting full information on the transposition of the 2004 Free Movement Directive⁴ into French law. Her intervention was grounded in a suspicion that the French were employing ethnic criteria to discriminate against Roma, which would be against EU law (Boswell and Geddes 2011: 195).

Tampere

The Tampere Programme specified a number of objectives.⁵ First, a ‘common migration and asylum policy’ was taken to mean efforts to promote partnership with countries of origin, to promote ‘fair treatment’ of non-EU nationals (TCNs), and to seek better management of migration flows with action to tackle illegal immigration. The second area identified by Tampere was creating ‘a genuine European area of justice’, p. 297↵including mutual recognition of judicial decisions. The third area was the ‘Union-wide fight against crime’, which sought to step up cooperation against crime. Finally, Tampere sought stronger external action, with closer integration of the external and internal dimensions of policy. This effort has become evident in what the EU calls its ‘global approach to migration’. Lavenex (2006) has noted that migration—typically the domain of interior ministries—has now acquired a significant foreign policy dimension.

Tampere was a powerful agenda-setting document. Political leaders tend not to have the time, ability, or inclination to flesh out the broad policy directions that they provide; they rely on officials to perform this function for them. On the basis of the Tampere conclusions, the Commission and the member states set to work. The Commission, in particular, was keen to stake out a role for itself, to develop credible policy ideas, and to set ambitious targets for realization of the various components of the AFSJ, identified by the Tampere document.

Particular progress was made in the development of common migration and asylum policies, but here, too, we see some distinct features of EU policy development: the dominance of the executive branch of national governments, and the existence of opt-out provisions for the UK, Ireland, and Denmark, but combined with a growing role for supranational institutions. There is an important distinction between free movement for EU citizens, which is covered by EU law, and the regulation of migration by TCNs, which is largely a matter for the member states. In 2013, a total of 3.4 million people immigrated to one of the EU’s twenty-eight member states (to become twenty-seven post-Brexit), while at least 2.8 million people emigrated from an EU member state.⁶ Of these 3.4 million immigrants, 1.4 million were from non-EU member states (TCNs), 1.2 million were citizens of another member state exercising their right to free movement, and a further 800,000 were returning to the country of which they held citizenship. In the 2000s, Italy, Spain, and the UK were key destination countries both for TCNs and EU free movers.

Between 2000 and 2006, Spain’s TCN migrant population rose by 194 per cent to 3.1 million. In 2006 alone, 840,000 people moved to Spain, of whom 500,000 were TCNs. A key issue for these countries has been border controls and efforts to tackle ‘irregular’ forms of migration—more precisely, those not authorized by migration policies.

After 2012, there were increases in migration by asylum seekers, with Germany and Sweden the key destinations. In 2015, there were more than 1.2 million asylum applications in the EU, with more than half of these in Germany and Sweden.⁷

The Hague

The Hague Programme covered the period 2004–09.⁸ It sought to move the EU from standards-setting measures, such as those on asylum, towards a more common approach to key internal security issues, including a common asylum policy. It also p. 298↵sought to deal with admissions policy, which had been an area in which member states had resisted the extension of EU competencies. There was further reinforcement of measures to tackle irregular migration, and to step up cooperation with non-EU member states on migration and asylum as part of the external dimension. This effort included measures to expel and return irregular migrants to their countries of origin. In December 2008, the ‘Return’ Directive, laying down rules on expulsion, was agreed. It was the first directive in the area of internal security to use the codecision procedure.

In the area of JPC, the Hague Programme sought greater exchange of information, which was indicative of the emphasis laid in EU internal security on the gathering of data through systems such as the SIS and Eurodac. The programme also called for greater use of Europol and the EU’s Judicial Cooperation Unit (Eurojust). Greater stress was laid in the Hague Programme on measures to tackle terrorism in terms of prevention, preparedness, and response.

Stockholm

The Stockholm Programme⁹ and subsequent action plan prepared by the Commission (European Commission 2010) marked a further development of the plans for the AFSJ in light of earlier developments, and also the revised structure for internal security policy developed in the Constitutional Treaty (which was dropped following ‘no’ votes in referenda held in France and the Netherlands in 2005). The key internal security elements of the Constitutional Treaty were included within the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, the main headings being: citizenship and fundamental rights, including strengthening cooperation in law enforcement; border management; civil protection; disaster management; and judicial cooperation. The importance of the ‘external dimension’ of internal security is a prominent feature of the Stockholm Programme. Its inclusion blurs the distinction between the responsibilities of interior and foreign ministries, and raises questions about how the EU can achieve objectives in non-member states. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was able to transpose fairly effectively its objectives into the national legal frameworks of accession states, because it was able to dangle the carrot of membership in front of them. It cannot offer a membership prospect to countries such as Morocco and Libya, but has been very keen to work with them to help to achieve objectives such as curbs on the flows of irregular migrants. Here, we see that the external dimension of internal security requires issue linkage if agreements are to be reached and if connections are to be made between issues such as migration control and border security, with issues of importance to sending and transit states, such as aid, trade, and development. As Paoletti (2011) shows, this stance gave repressive regimes, such as that in Libya, leverage and the ability to extract concession from the EU, such as funding for major infrastructural projects. These connections with the Gaddafi regime caused embarrassment for EU p. 299↵leaders in the aftermath of the popular uprising that began in 2011 and subsequent military action led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Border control was a key motive for cooperation and became a concern because of people smuggling operations from Libya following the effective breakdown of governance after 2011.

The Strategic Guidelines

The Strategic Guidelines¹⁰ were an attempt to step back from numerous targets and objectives contained within the Stockholm Programme; instead, the focus was on consolidation of existing measures—although the attempt to be strategic was seriously challenged by the refugee crisis and the difficulties that it provoked in terms of securing cooperation between member states, as well as developing the commitment within the Guidelines to working with non-member states. This external dimension proved very difficult because of the massive displacement caused by the conflict in Syria, estimated at more than 4 million people by summer 2015, with the majority moving to the neighbouring states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey.

Anti-terrorism

Anti-terrorism policy developed in the context of the revised JPC pillar, with a focus on cooperation outside of the Community decision-making processes and a limited role for supranational institutions. Initially, the September 2001 (‘9/11’) attacks on Washington DC and New York played a powerful role in impelling cooperation, but the institutional base for such cooperation was already established, and the ‘meaning’ of security had been powerfully defined by interior ministries and security agencies beginning in the 1970s, meaning that there was a powerful institutional repertoire that provided the basis for responses to 9/11 and subsequent terror attacks, such as those in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005. Two common positions were agreed in 2001 on the funding of terrorist organizations and the freezing of terrorist assets. A Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism was adopted in mid-2002 that sought to create a common EU-wide definition of ‘terrorist organization’. This definition was broad, going beyond that included in United Nations (UN) p. 300↵conventions, and thus was seen by some as having the potential to lead to the application of anti-terrorist laws to public protest more generally, with the risk of trampling on civil liberties. The Madrid attack led to the appointment of an EU anti-terrorism coordinator, an anti-terrorism action plan, and a ‘scoreboard’ to monitor implementation of measures in the action plan. Following the London attacks, an extraordinary meeting of EU interior ministers was held, at which it was agreed that all measures that had already been agreed should be implemented as a matter of urgency. This list included the European evidence warrant (EEW), the strengthening of the SIS and visa information system, biometric details on passports, stronger efforts to combat terrorist financing, efforts to prevent recruitment and radicalization, and stronger controls on the trade, storage, and transport of explosives. After 2012, concern grew about Muslim citizens of EU member states moving to Iraq and Syria to join with the so-called Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization. The murderous attacks in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016 were carried out by terrorists linked to IS (see Box 12.4). In June 2014, the Council adopted an EU Strategy for Combating Radicalization and Recruitment to Terrorism, with the aim of tackling the causes of radicalization. There have also been efforts to promote EU–US cooperation, which have proven controversial, as Box 12.5 illustrates.

p. 301↵

Migration, asylum, and border controls

Migration, asylum, and border controls were located within the new Title IV, and subject to application of Community decision rules, with a transitional period until p. 302↵2004. There were two key policy drives in the aftermath of Amsterdam and Tampere that reflected consolidation of EU efforts to ‘securitize’ migration: the development of a common asylum policy, and efforts to tackle irregular migration. The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) was put in place in 2003, containing a ‘Dublin II’ regulation, which brought the one-stop asylum procedure into the framework of EU law plus directives on temporary protection, reception conditions, qualifications to enter the asylum process, and asylum procedures. A revised framework—so-called CEAS II—was in place by 2013. These were criticized for focusing on minimum standards and gave a lot of wiggle room to member states. The refugee crisis provoked a crisis in the Dublin system because, in response to the humanitarian crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on 4 September 2015 that all asylum applications by Syrians would be considered, irrespective of the point at which they entered the EU. In September 2015 alone, around 200,000 asylum seekers arrived. In the summer and autumn of 2015, hundreds of thousands of people were moving across Europe to Germany, with tensions at the borders of Greece, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia. The Commission’s European Agenda for Migration of May 2015 proposed relocation for asylum seekers (European Commission 2015a). Agreement was reached in 2015, for relocation of up to 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece, Italy, and Hungary to other EU member states. By March 2016, fewer than 700 people had actually been relocated. The UK refused to participate in this mandatory EU scheme, and announced separate plans to take in 20,000 people from Syria between 2015 and 2020. The EU also sought agreement with Turkey to reinforce border controls and to stop movement towards Europe, although Turkey insisted on further assistance with refugees amounting to €3 billion and raised the issue of visa liberalization for Turkish nationals moving to the EU.

The European arrest warrant

The European arrest warrant (EAW) shows how single-market principles in the form of mutual recognition have been applied to internal security. The EAW is a warrant for arrest that is valid throughout the EU. Building on the objectives specified in the Tampere document to step up the fight against crime and to extend the principle of mutual recognition, a framework decision of 2002 was made that entered into force on 1 January 2004. The EAW is designed to speed up the process of extradition and is based on the principle that warrants issued for arrest by national judicial authorities are recognized by other member states. The EAW was used to return Osman Hussain, suspected of involvement in the failed bombings in London in July 2004, to the UK from Italy. More controversially, Andrew Symeou, a British national, was sent to Greece on a manslaughter charge for alleged involvement in a death at a nightclub in 2007. Symeou denied the charge and questions were raised about the evidence, as well as allegations of mistreatment of witnesses by the Greek authorities. Symeou spent eleven months in prison before being released on bail. He was cleared of the charges in June 2011.