Preparing the environment for the EPPO

Abstract

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 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 creation of the first EU investigating and prosecuting authority. However, the structure and functioning 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 implemented by national law‘, make the EPPO as an authority whose legal environment largely builds on the national legal systems. Therefore, the putting in place of the new investigative body is far from fully eradicating in 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 reshape training of all legal practitioners involved in criminal investigations (first of all when dealing with PIF offences) as the essential condition for the new European investigating 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 genuine European legal culture. The article then analyses the main features of a proposal for a training curriculum based on an ius commune perspective recently drafted in the framework of the EUPenTRAIN project run by the Centro di Diritto Penale Europeo of Catania and co-financed by Olaf.