ECJ / Hard Cases
The role of supranational institutions in EU Justice and Home Affairs
Gefördert vom
"Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)"
Laufzeit: 2011 - 2013
The EU’s cooperation in the field of justice and home affairs (JHA) touches upon core functions of statehood, namely safeguarding internal security, controlling national frontiers and providing citizens with justice. Against this background, member states have been reluctant to give the supranational EU institutions a bigger say in this sensitive policy. The cooperation has developed since the mid-70s in a range of intergovernmental groups, which operated with a high degree of autonomy and secrecy. The Maastricht Treaty first added an intergovernmental ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ pillar to the EU’s treaty architecture, yet preserved the strict unanimity requirement and kept the supranational institutions at arm’s length.
The JHA output achieved in this intergovernmental policy-making system was met with strong criticism. Unanimous decision-making was seen to hamper progress and frequently lead to policies that reflected lowest common denominator outcomes, thereby reducing for instance the domestic asylum protection standards in those member states which previously had more liberal regimes (Guiraudon, 2001: 50; Barbou des Places, 2003; Lavenex, 2001). Virginie Guiraudon (2000) famously phrased the argument of ‘venue shopping’, meaning that like-minded strategic actors, typically from ministries of the interior, seek venues of decision-making at EU level in which they are protected from actors with other preferences. In this view, the EU was primarily used in the field to ease the constraints that were exerted by constitutions, jurisprudence and laws at the national level. A second type of criticism concerned the lack of transparency and democratic accountability of the intergovernmental decision-making procedures of the Maastricht pillar. This was of particular relevance, as EU cooperation in the JHA field has dealt with sensitive matters potentially involving civil liberties risks.
In response to this criticism, the member states have progressively enhanced the involvement of the European Commission and the European Parliament in the decision-making process. Starting from pure intergovernmentalism, the decision-making has gradually moved towards the supranational hierarchical mode. The Treaty of Amsterdam introduced the first major shift towards Communitarisation in the justice and home affairs domain by transferring the policy fields of asylum, 2 immigration, external border controls and civil law matters to the Community first pillar under Title IV. The Treaty of Lisbon ended this institutional development by transferring the remaining third pillar areas (judicial cooperation in criminal matters and police cooperation) to the Community Pillar.
This project will analyse in a systematic and comprehensive manner the impact of the enhanced competences of the European Commission and the European Parliament on the dynamics of decisionmaking in the JHA field. The key research questions are as follows:
- Do these supranational institutions matter for JHA policy development?
- Has the change of the institutional set-up of EU justice and home affairs cooperation exerted an impact of policy development, notably with regard to the delicate balance between individual rights and security considerations?
- If this is so, how and under which conditions can the Commission and the European Parliament exert influence on policy development in the JHA field?
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