The Proposed European Public Prosecutor’s Office – from a Trojan Horse to a White Elephant?

Abstract

The concept of a European prosecution service operating within a single legal area as proposed by the 1997 Corpus Juris study aimed to tackle impediments to the prosecution of budgetary fraud cases in the transnational context. Subsequent compromises shifted the focus of negotiations from creating a European prosecution service with uniform powers to the integration thereof into the divergent national legal systems. This paper analyses relevant documents up to the draft endorsed by the 2015 Luxembourg Presidency and concludes that the scene is set for autonomous and binding Union decisions to prosecute budgetary fraud at national level. Nonetheless, the low-level of Europeanisation coupled with an increasingly complex model and no real scheme to tackle the fragmentation of national criminal laws fail to enable effective and consistent prosecutions of EU budgetary fraud.