The Diplomat
The Parliamentary Group Ciudadanos has presented a motion in which it urges the Government to support a reform of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) to incorporate “crimes against the constitutional order of the Member States” and to lead an initiative in the EU to convert Europol “into a European FBI”.
The motion, presented last January 21 by the MP Marta Martin Llaguno for debate in the Joint Committee for the European Union, recalls that the European Arrest Warrant is a judicial procedure in which the issuing State can only provide technical support or act through the Prosecutor’s Office and which provides for a list of 32 offenses homologable in all Member States for which the delivery will be made virtually automatically. For crimes that are not included in this list, the principle of “double criminality” is applied, which requires that the crime for which the Euro warrant is required is criminalized in the two States involved.
Within this framework, Ciudadanos recalls, Spanish judge Pablo Llarena was forced to issue European Arrest Warrant against Carles Puigdemont and others indicted by the Supreme Court on charges of rebellion – related to “actions contrary to the Spanish legal framework and the rule of law that they perpetrated between September 2017 and October 2017” – after both the former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia and some of the defendants decided to “take advantage of the Schengen area to flee to other Member States of the European Union, mainly Belgium”.
“The differences between the legal systems of the Member States and the very specific nature of the crimes of rebellion for which the defendants were accused, among other factors, such as whether the application of European legislation by the courts that had to resolve these proceedings was in accordance with the law, meant that these European Arrest Warrants were not resolved satisfactorily”, it continues.
“The reactions to this decision were not long in coming, with populist and nationalist figures pointing to the Schengen area as the culprit of this ruling and urging the Spanish government to suspend it,” Ciudadanos recalls. “It is not the Schengen area that does not allow a proper functioning of the European Arrest Warrant, but the very design of the same agreed by the Member States, as well as its application by the courts of the different Member States that issue and execute them”, it warns.
For this reason, Ciudadanos, “as a purely pro-European party, established as an objective the reform of the European Arrest Warrant during this European legislature”, thanks to which it achieved, among other things, that the Commissioner for Justice, the Belgian Didier Reynders, committed to reforming the European order and that the Committee on Freedoms, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament approved, on December 3, a revision of the list of 32 criminal categories, which includes, among others, “crimes against the constitutional integrity of the Member States committed through the use of violence”. The reform was ratified by the plenary session of the European Parliament on January 20.
For all these reasons, the motion of the Parliamentary Group of Ciudadanos urges the Government to “express express support for the reform of the European Arrest Warrant” to “incorporate crimes against the constitutional order of the Member States, crimes involving the use of violence or a serious threat to public order, in line with what was approved by the European Parliament” and to raise, within the Council of the European Union, “the need to promote this reform of the European Arrest Warrant by issuing a mandate to the European Commission to submit a legislative proposal in this regard”.
It also asks the Government to lead “the commitment to provide Europol with more capacities, means and competences” to transform this body into “a European FBI”, a “security force of a police nature at European level that acts in close cooperation with the Member States and is the main center of cooperation, coordination and exchange of police information in the European Union”.
