The Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Eamonn Barnes, is not someone who seeks out the media spotlight. He makes only the very occasional foray into public comment, but during his 22 years as DPP he has gained a deserved reputation for making thought provoking contributions to the debate on all aspects of the criminal justice system. In making the case for a truly European system of criminal justice, Mr Barnes graphically underlines the underdeveloped nature of justice co-operation among European states, when compared to harmonisation in other areas. "It is no doubt important that I can purchase a tomato anywhere in the European Union secure in the knowledge that it conforms to certain standards. It would seem of much greater importance that what is lawful in one country is lawful in all the others and that infringements of the law will throughout have similar if not identical consequences," he writes in a new book, Justice Co-operation in the European Union, published by the Institute for European Affairs.
In truth, the level of progress on joint EU policies for justice and home affairs has been derisory, despite the EU's stated intention of making the policies of the Union more relevant to the lives of the ordinary citizen. The Maastricht Treaty did establish a new pillar for co-operation on justice and home affairs issues but EU co-operation remains, for the most part, aspirational, notwithstanding the efforts made to build on the Maastricht commitments at the Amsterdam summit. The average citizen in this State, for example, is probably unaware of any great EU input in the battle against drug-trafficking even though this is an issue which troubles every parent, every family and every community.
In many respects, the EU's underachievement in the area of justice and home affairs should not surprise; these are policy areas which are seen by many governments as the exclusive preserve of the national state. There is also a sense in many states that its own legal system is tried and tested, that it has the benefit of history and tradition and that it is something with which there should be no tampering. All of this ignores the multi-national nature of much international crime, especially in the areas of drug trafficking and fraud and the need for closer co-operation on asylum and immigration issues. It also obscures the salient point made by Mr Barnes: the evolution of a truly European criminal justice system is essential to the development of the EU itself.
Some progress has been made in sketching out a common framework for dealing with these issues. But EU policy in these areas is still a strangled amalgam of (mostly non-contentious) policies which are decided at EU level and those - on sensitive policy areas - which remain dependent on co-operation between individual governments. Much remains to be done. A worthwhile first step might be to give the European Commission, the effective locomotive of the EU, the power to initiate proposals on justice and home affairs in much the same way that it sets the agenda in other areas. This, at the very least, would have the virtue of injecting some badly-needed momentum in this area.