TAMPERE EUROPEAN COUNCIL

The important summit meeting at Tampere on 15-16 October agreed on a number of major initiatives.

• A common EU asylum and migration policy. This will involve a common European asylum system, based on the full and inclusive application of the Geneva Refugees Convention; also management of migration flows, partnership with countries of origin and fair treatment of third country nationals, the latter including the virtual assimilation of long-term resident aliens with domestic nationals.
• A genuine European area of justice. This involves:
  1. better access to justice in Europe, including minimum standards of legal aid in cross-border cases, together with special common procedural rules for simplified and accelerated cross-border litigation on small consumer and commercial claims, common minimum standards for multilingual forms and documents used in cross-border court cases, and minimum standards for the protection of victims of crime;
  2. mutual recognition of judicial decisions, including the abolition of all intermediate steps in enforcing foreign judgments in respect of small consumer and commercial claims, which would then become immediately enforceable in all Member States ("this could be accompanied by the setting of minimum standards on specific aspects of civil procedural law"), as well as the development of a European Enforcement Order and the application of mutual recognition to pre-trial orders such as Mareva injunctions;
  3. greater convergence in civil law:
     • (a) "preparation of new procedural legislation in cross-border cases, in particular on those elements which are instrumental to smooth judicial co-operation and enhanced access to law, e.g. provisional measures, taking of evidence, orders for money payment and time limits";
     • (b) "as regards substantive law, an overall study on the need to approximate Member States’ legislation in civil matters in order to eliminate obstacles to the good functioning of civil procedings". The Council to report back by 2001
• A Union-wide fight against crime. This involves:
  1. preventing crime at the level of the Union;
  2. stepping up co-operation against crime, especially through joint investigative teams in which Europol representatives should participate in a support capacity, an enhancement of the and operational functions of Europol, the creation of a special unit, EUROJUST, composed of national prosecutors, magistrates or police officers of equivalent competence, and of a European Police College, full mutual legal assistance in the investigation and prosecution of serious economic crime, and finally "with regard to national criminal law, efforts to agree on common definitions, incriminations and sanctions should be focused in the first instance on a limited number of sectors of particular relevance, such as financial crime (money laundering, corruption, Euro counterfeiting), drugs trafficking, trafficking in human beings, sexual exploitation of children, high-tech crime and environmental crime";
  3. special action against money laundering.
• Stronger external action.
• The establishment of a body to elaborate a draft EU charter of fundamental rights as set out in the Cologne Conclusions. This would consist of a representative of each of the 15 Heads of State or Government and of the Commission President plus 16 MEPs plus 30 MPs (2 from each national Parliament), with two representatives each of the ECJ and of the Council of Europe as observers. "Other bodies, social groups and experts may be invited to give their views". Hearings and documents should in principle be public. No time limit is mentioned, but end-2000 was stated at the General Affairs Council on 13 September.

There is no mention in the Presidency conclusions issued at the end of the Tampere meeting of the proposals for a corpus juris which have been circulating since earlier this year and which would provide for something like an EU public prosecutor for economic crimes against EU funds (see most usefully the House of Lords Committee report of 8 May 1999 on "Prosecuting fraud on the Communities’ finances - The Corpus Juris" (HL.62).