NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE EUROPEAN ARREST WARRANT AND THE EUROPEAN INVESTIGATION ORDER

Resumo

Observing the newest perspectives based on the development of mutual legal assistance, in face of the challenges posed by the celerity and dynamism required by post-modernity, the innumerable advances obtained by the mechanisms of legal cooperation in criminal matters between the States are evident, particularly with regard to the simplification of procedures and improvement of deadlines and responses to acts performed abroad. However, building a space of Freedom, Security and Justice in the criminal field opens a series of questions, including the construction of a penal space that guarantees fundamental rights. That said, based on a doctrinal, documental and jurisprudential analysis, the present work aims to investigate the provisions of the European Arrest Warrant and the European Investigation Decision, since the States are given great latitude in deciding which authorities are competent. Thus, there is an absence of criteria that determine which powers, or the function that attributes to a particular authority the competence to issue one of these decisions, which has raised these types of problems in the execution of these decisions. Therefore, this absence of more objective criteria to determine who can what, and why they can, to this investigation seems to weaken cooperation within the Union.