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Senior civil servant questions European cooperation (1)

01 January 1991

Senior civil servant questions European cooperation
artdoc May=1991
Statewatch no.1 March/April 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 Justiti?le Verkenningen, December 1990.