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Senior civil servant questions European cooperation

01 March 1991

In an interview with NRC-Handelsblad (Dutch quality daily) Mr J J E Schutte senior negotiator for the Dutch government in several European fora on judicial and police cooperation and professor of European criminal law cooperation criticizes the process of European criminal law harmonization. He states that a period of rest for a fundamental discussion on the emerging European criminal law is urgently needed. The immensely complicated processes of negotiation and cooperation have become much too cluttered and obscure. Small countries like Holland simply lack the necessary officials to attend every meeting of all the international fora coordinate with other services and implement new laws let alone reflect on the deeper consequences. Schutte has been a leading Dutch negotiator in several international consultative bodies such as the Schengen meetings. He points to the fact that a lot of work is done twice in different fora: representatives negotiate on items concerning criminal law that have long been agreed upon by the same countries in other meetings. Each club can't let another group get away with successes so in the end almost every international organization adopts its own rules and regulations. He also criticizes the quality of a lot of the European rules: "The quality of a lot of regulations is so lamentably poor that if I would produce such work here I would be fired in less than a week. But now this is about guidelines that overrule national laws". Schutte says Dutch politicians are too light-hearted on the consequences of European unification in these matters. He mentions the example of the Dutch liberal drugs policy that could be the first victim of European unification. NRC Handelsblad 17.12.90 Peek in Justitiele Verkenningen, December 1990.

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