European Criminal Law has developed into a complex, jagged subject matter, which at the same time has become increasingly important for everyday criminal law practice. On the one hand, this work aims to do comprehensive justice to the complexity of the matter without sacrificing readability. In order to achieve this, the book’s structure enables legal scholars and experienced practitioners to access the information relevant to them in a targeted manner and, at the same time, enables less-oriented readers to gain access to European Criminal Law. Thus, the volume both answers basic questions and offers discussion in more specialised areas. Written by experts in the field, the book offers discussions that are both of the highest academic standards and accessibly readable.

Chapter 9 is titled ‘Other Areas’. Hence, it examines the Unions competence to require Member States (‘MS’) to harmonize substantive criminal law in certain areas, in particular its competence to require MS to set out criminal law offences and penalties in ‘further areas’, besides the cross-border crimes covered by Article 83(1) TFEU and the PIF Directive. We focus on Article 83(2) TFEU and divide the chapter into four parts. The first part traces the development of the EUs competence in the further areas of substantive criminal law prior and after the Treaty of Lisbons entry into force. The second part provides an overview of further harmonized areas, with a special focus on the areas of environmental protection, market abuse and protection of the financial sector, migration and employer sanctions as well as discrimination and hate speech. The third part looks at possible future areas of harmonization, while the fourth part concludes the chapter by discussing bits and pieces of a general part of substantive criminal law found in the existing harmonization measures at the EU level.

One important aspect of the legal effects of CIL within the EU legal order concerns the questions of whether CIL can be relied upon in EU law-related administrative or judicial proceedings and, correspondingly, whether administrative and judicial authorities are obliged to apply CIL in such proceedings in order to decide the case at hand. This is the problem of the ‘invocability’, ‘enforceability’ or the ‘direct effect’ of EU law. As there has so far only been marginal treatment of the direct effect of CIL (as opposed to that of international agreements), the chapter aims at clarifying whether and to what extent the solutions devised for the direct effect of international agreements can be transferred to CIL, that is, whether the ‘treaty analogy’ holds. In this regard, the chapter pleads not only for a uniform direct effect test for international agreements and CIL norms, but for a uniform direct effect analysis for all provisions of EU law, internal and external alike. The chapter further argues that the existing differences among the various types of EU law norms as well as the specificities of each individual provision can be adequately dealt with by applying a context-sensitive analysis of the respective provision of EU law.

This chapter provides a comparative study of the application of proportionality by English and Greek judges in the field of EC market freedoms. It shows that both English and Greek judges have assumed their mission of juges communautaires de droit commun. Despite this appearance of convergence, I argue, the reception of proportionality follows local patterns of cultural change and local knowledge practices, which affect local lawyers’ possibilities to resist to the process of European integration, as well as their capacity shape this process. Common law pragmatism has allowed English courts to frame normative conflicts between domestic and EC law. When proportionality and the effet utile of EC market freedoms entered into conflict with fundamental constitutional principles of the common law, English judges have occasionally objected to their application. By way of contrast, the perception of law as science has not allowed Greek lawyers to frame normative conflicts between domestic and EC law. Proportionality as a European science has engineered important constitutional change and has considerably compromised the normativity of the Greek Constitution.