From facts and political objectives to legal bases and legal provisions: Incremental European integration in the criminal law field

This contribution intends to show that normative foundations, in the sense of foundations prescribing norms or expressing prescriptions, have been rather limited in determining or defining the legal bases, legal provisions and their evolution in EU criminal law. EU primary and secondary law in penal matters has indeed been adopted mainly in reaction to the need to adjust to reality, to face challenges, react to facts, incidents and threats and to implement overwhelmingly political objectives, which themselves follow most of the time from the said factual or operational needs resulting from practice. This thus calls for an assessment of the advantages and risks of the relatively decisive role of external factors on the development of criminal justice in the EU.