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.