Towards new form of cooperation in criminal matters

In the last twenty years, judicial cooperation in criminal matters in the European Union changed radically and it is still changing. In the field of evidence-gathering and investigations, the old rogatorial system has been replaced by new, simplified forms of cooperation which do not need the intermediation of the political power (i.e., Governments) and grant mutual trust. Indeed, free circulation of people entails free circulation of crimes and evidence in the EU. Moreover, from a society ever smarter and more high-tech follows new forms of criminality (such as e-crimes) which go beyond the traditional territoriality principle and need for fast cross-border evidence gathering. Consequently, the purpose of this essay is to briefly analyse the tools that the EU adopted, and hopefully will adopt, to face the aforementioned challenges of the last years: the European Evidence Warrant (EEW), the European Investigation Order (EIO), the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) and the European Production and Preservation Order (EPO). In doing so, the hope is to highlight both their strength and importance in the EU judicial cooperation and the need to make people aware of these instruments, which are very little known by many practitioners. Therefore, it would be useful to disseminate them as much as possible, in order to spread their use and discover the actual problems in practice: there is, indeed, much space to improve these new tools.