Constitutional challenges to the European Arrest Warrant; a challenge for European law: the merging of internal and external security

This book is about the judgments of the supreme courts of a number of Member States which determine constitutionality of some part or parts of implementing legislation transposing the EU Framework Decision on the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) into national law. The Framework Decision, adopted in June 2002, seeks to change the mechanism by which individuals sought for trial or punishment in one Member State, but who are present in another Member State, are made available to the Member State which seeks to try or punish them. This mechanism has traditionally been called extradition and has been the subject of international agreements. According to the Framework Decision, individuals, including nationals of the state, must be surrendered to the authorities of other Member States for trial or punishment in respect of a specified list of offences on a warrant issued by the authorities of the seeking state. The Framework Decision is revolutionary in international criminal law. While the majority of EAWs which have been issued by Member State authorities have been executed with the consent of the individual, a small number have been challenged. Some of these challenges have arrived before the constitutional courts of the Member States which have been required to consider to what extent the national law implementing the EAW is consistent with national constitutions. A number of Member States’ supreme courts have given negative decisions. In this book the decisions of the constitutional courts of Cyprus, Finland Germany and Poland are considered. A court of a fifth Member State, Belgium, has referred preliminary questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the correct interpretation of the EAW. This is the first time in the EU’s history that there has been such wide spread judicial criticism of the implementation of any measure adopted in the EU’s area of freedom security and justice. The jurisprudence on the EAW in two other Member States – France and Spain – is also included in this book because of the importance of those two countries as key ‘users’ of the EAW.