EU Justice and Home Affairs Law

Abstract

Steve Peers's book on ‘Third Pillar' matters is a remarkable volume, at both what one might call the ‘macro-' and ‘micro-' levels. At the higher level, it gives some sense of quite how much action has been taken in the sensitive fields of criminal law and immigration under the EU umbrella. At the level of detail, Peers shows just how complex the programmes are. Harmonisation and integration become relative ideas when law and policy at the heart of the state become matters of EU concern. On the one hand, the need for precision comes from the demands of certainty in criminal law and procedure and also so that the states can satisfy their domestic constituencies of that to which they have agreed; on the other, these requirements of exactness and clarity reveal that some outcomes are clearly unacceptable to some states, so that those which cannot be assuaged by specific, special conditions must have opts out, exceptions, delays in implementation, and so on. As if this were not enough, the tricky balancing process between furthering security policies (in the widest sense) and respecting human rights, which is always a feature of rule-making in these areas of law, has become even harder to manage since 11 September 2001.