UK keeps up resistance to Europol plan

Date: 14/03/1996

By Thomas Klau

THE UK is defying strong pressure from its EU partners to drop its opposition to any attempt to give the European Court of Justice the power to exert legal control over Europol's activities.

In the run-up to a meeting of justice and home affairs ministers next week, EU ambassadors have been trying to find a way out of the deadlock which has hampered the work of the fledging criminal intelligence agency since it was set up on 1 January 1994.

But so far they have failed to make any headway, with British officials rejecting as “inconclusive” a report from the European Commission's legal services which cites a series of hypothetical cases to highlight the need for a unitary legal interpretation of Europol's prerogatives.

Confronted with these case studies, the UK delegation has argued that national interpretations of Europol's powers may vary without putting individual liberties or citizens' rights at risk.

That argument is, however, disputed by most other delegations, with several pointing to the risk that a citizen wronged by Europol might in some cases fall into a legal void and fail to get adequate redress if national courts differed on which member state should shoulder responsibility and foot the bill.

To the ire of some heads of government, the UK is still refusing to accept the opt-out solution suggested as a compromise by the Spanish presidency late last year.

As a result, its 14 EU partners are being prevented from pressing ahead without the UK and devolving the supervision of Europol's continental activities to the Luxembourg Court.

London argues that if it were to agree to the opt-out plan, British judges, although not legally bound to do so, would automatically base their own interpretation of the Europol Convention on rulings from Luxembourg.

As parliaments in the Benelux countries and other EU member states have declared they will not ratify the Europol Convention unless a unitary interpretation of its legal scope is guaranteed, the conflict has reached an impasse and few currently see a way out.

At their summit meeting in Cannes in June last year, EU leaders agreed to find a solution within a year, allowing a deal to be concluded at the Florence summit in June at the latest.

But no progress has been made since then. The rejection of the Spanish compromise, which would have given member states the right to opt into the Court's jurisdiction, means that even the time-honoured opt-out solution has foundered on British intransigence.

Observers put down the UK's harsh stance to the increasingly tenuous parliamentary majority of the British government, which is keen to avoid anything that might provoke Eurosceptic Conservative MPs.

In a number of recent rulings, the Luxembourg judges and their colleagues from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg have declared long-established British practices to run counter to European law.

This has infuriated Eurosceptic Tories, for whom both courts have become symbols of continental interference with British sovereignty.

A further extension of the supreme Court's powers would inevitably trigger a new outburst from the anti-EU right.

With British policemen using the services of the European Drug Unit, the forerunner to Europol more than any other European police force, with the exception of Germany's, Jürgen Storbeck, coordinator of the Unit, has been pressing for a solution to the ratification dispute.