This paper contains a vision, footed in EU and member state realities, balanced but at the same time without too much compromising, which hopefully may somehow revolutionize policies through sufficient out of the box thinking. Much like the Study on the future institutional and legal framework of judicial cooperation in criminal matters in the EU, called for by the European Commission and concluded just weeks ago in a joint effort of the EU criminal law research unit of the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), content-wise connects the dots of many EU criminal law cooperation research projects conducted at IRCP over the years,4 often funded by the European Commission. In the aforementioned study, our original mandate has been to conceptually prepare the future of judicial cooperation in criminal matters – to sort of design an EU master plan for judicial cooperation, doing away with inconsistencies, incoherencies and lacunae that have been prompted by the organic development that has characterized the very domain. Not only does the study encompass all traditional judicial cooperation domains (extradition/surrender, mutual legal assistance (hereafter: MLA), transfer of
prosecution, transfer of the execution of foreign sentences). It also covers the trans-border pre-trial supervision of suspects, the exchange of criminal records information, the taking account of previous foreign convictions in new proceedings, the cross-border protection and relocation of witnesses and collaborators with justice. It further addresses the future of Eurojust and assesses the need for a European Public Prosecutor’s Office. All this proved to be impossible without radically thinking bigger, beyond the borders of judicial cooperation. We broadened our field of play (convincing the European Commission of the necessity thereof), resolutely adding police cooperation (including the future of Europol) to it, moving into the intersection between criminal and administrative law, juggling with
intelligence-led approaches, information and intelligence sharing practices and intelligence actors that have set foot on criminal law territory, actively blurring all traditional boundaries in order to see more clearly after it, in the pursuit of a renewed logic, coherence and balance. Applied to the future of cross-border gathering and use of evidence in criminal matters, this paper explores the possibilities and preconditions for enhanced freedom in gathering (i.e. during the pre-trial investigation stage) respectively using (i.e. during the trial stage) evidence in criminal matters in the EU.