The Cjeu as a Defender of Mutual Trust

Abstract

Even if mutual trust is considered to be the cornerstone of judicial cooperation in criminal matters, it still lacks an explicit normative basis. Therefore, it required consolidation in judicial practice. The present article looks into the position that the CJEU has taken in relation to mutual trust, consecutively in the context of the ne bis in idem rule, in a mutual recognition setting, and finally in its recent Opinion 2/13 on EU accession to the ECHR, where mutual trust was exposed as one of the key specificities of EU law. The author argues that the Court may have become the strongest fortress of defence of mutual trust in spite of the crisis lingering around this concept.