Exploring the impact of legal culture in shaping the role of the European Public Prosecutor:the prospects for penal moderation

The idea of the office of the European Public Prosecutor (EPPO) is now a well-advanced concept and component of EU crime policy which has been given new impetus since the Treaty of Lisbon within the competence laid down in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), but is still a matter of ambivalent support on the part of many of the Member States. Enthusiasm for a more effective control of criminal activities affecting the financial interests of the EU remains tempered by a wariness regarding incursion into national prosecution policy and practice. Such an ambivalent attitude is to be expected in view of the existing diversity of prosecutorial tradition and practice across the Member States, and this complex jigsaw of legal culture needs to be considered carefully in the development of EU policy. At the same time a number of competing trends jostle together in the evolution of this area of criminal policy – the efficient transnational management of certain types of crime, the deployment of limited resources, criminalisation and decriminalisation, and the promotion of alternatives to formal criminal procedure, such as administrative procedures and restorative justice. Therefore, the opportunity should be taken, in fashioning the role of the EPPO, to consider how and to what extent this emergent EU institution and process should accommodate what are now also being put forward as EU strategies of penal moderation and diversification in the methods of legal control of delinquent conduct