The emergent EU criminal policy: Identifying the species

This article analyses the EU Commission’s recent Communication of September 2011, ‘Towards an EU Criminal Policy’ in an attempt to identify more precisely the nature and role of what is now commonly referred to as ‘EU criminal law’ and to extrapolate some theoretical foundation for the deployment of criminal law at the European level. This analysis is framed around three major tensions in contemporary criminal law development - criminalisation versus soft compliance, security versus justice and rights protection, and globalisation versus local diversity – leading in turn to three main questions – why use criminal law, with what risks, and why at the EU level ?