Pursuing criminals across EU borders while protecting fundamental rights

What the project is about

Within the European Union, the traditional extradition procedure has been replaced by the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), which makes it much faster and easier to hand suspected and convicted offenders over to another Member State. Poor prison conditions in the destination country, however, often stand in the way. According to the case law of the European Court of Justice, a person may not be surrendered if there are (1) systemic deficiencies in detention conditions and (2) they would face a real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment there (CJEU, Aranyosi and Căldăraru, C-404/15 and C-659/15 PPU, ECLI:EU:C:2016:198). This two-step test is hard to apply in practice. It delays surrenders, prolongs detention and is handled differently across Member States, so that people are sometimes wrongly surrendered and sometimes wrongly held back.

The project Mutual Recognition and Detention Conditions (MRDetCon) brings together academics and practitioners from four Member States to improve the effective and consistent application of the relevant EU instruments. The project does not prescribe how authorities must act; rather, it works towards cross-border prosecution that functions well and prevents impunity, while making sure that no one is exposed to inhuman or degrading detention. It also examines alternatives to the Arrest Warrant, such as transferring the prosecution or the enforcement of a sentence, or cross-border measures that avoid detention altogether.

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