European and International Criminal Cooperation: A Matter of Trust? Case Note 1/2017

The year 2016 offered two additional opportunities to the ECJ to pronounce itself on the crucial and tricky tension between the preservation of the criminal policy’s effectiveness on the one hand and the concrete protection of Human Rights on the other. In its first judgment Aranyosi and Căldăraru2 , rendered in April and already widely discussed3 , the Court had to rule on the protection of the principle of human dignity and the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatments in the field of EU criminal cooperation. The question submitted to the ECJ was whether solid evidence, showing that the detention conditions in a Member State issuing a European arrest warrant (hereafter: EAW) were incompatible with fundamental rights, could allow or oblige the executing judicial authority of a requested Member State to refuse the execution of that arrest warrant. A few months later, a similar question was raised but this time in the field of International cooperation. More specifically the ECJ was asked under which conditions in terms of protection of fundamental rights Mr. Petruhhin, an Estonian citizen who had made use of his right to move freely within the EU, could be surrendered upon an extradition request by Latvia to a third country, Russia