Search

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) is a judicial body of the European Union (EU), created in 2017 to investigate and prosecute crimes against the EU financial interests. The aim of this thesis is to explain how and why national and supranational institutional actors, through the establishment of the EPPO, come to construct supranational criminal justice. By establishing the EPPO, the 22 participating member states of the EU transferred key sovereign powers – pertaining to criminal justice – to a supranational body. Criminal justice is closely linked to the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the definition and protection of essential societal values. This is why states generally want to maintain their authority over this policy field. Accordingly, common EU action in this field has mostly relied on cooperation, coordination, and mutual recognition, essentially keeping national judicial systems intact and limiting their submission to supranational authority. The EPPO, with its binding and far-reaching enforcement powers, presents a clear departure from this pattern.To understand the drivers of this transfer of sovereign powers and how the various institutional actors in the EU arena are shaping supranational criminal justice in that respect, we must find out how key actors themselves understand (their) sovereignty in relation to European integration. I, therefore, adopt an ideational approach to this question to examine how ideas and discourse – rather than functionalist pressures, national interests, or international norms – have resulted in the creation of the EPPO and shaped its modalities. Concretely, I adopt a discursive institutionalist approach to show how discourse influences institution-building.Through this theoretical lens, I uncover the various ideas held on the protection of the EU financial interests and how they are articulated with ideas on national sovereignty and European integration in that context. I operationalise the coordina, Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In 2017, member states established the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), an EU body investigating and prosecuting offences against the EU financial interests. This article analyses the relation between the institutional design of the EPPO and sovereignty concerns of member states. Combining the core state powers framework with literature on Council negotiation dynamics, it argues that the Council was divided on the question of how far-reaching the authority of this new body vis-à-vis member states should be or to what extent member states should retain control over the body. A qualitative discourse analysis shows that the competition between states sharing a supranational position regarding the EPPO and those sharing an intergovernmental position resulted in the creation of a complex and ambiguous body. These findings contribute to the literature on agencification of Justice and Home Affairs as well as, more broadly, to scholarship on the construction of new types of authority., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

info:eu-repo/semantics/published