This introductory article offers an account of how the principle of ‘effectiveness’ in EU law has shaped the development of EU criminal law. I will try to explain why effectiveness reasoning has played an important function in the development and formation of EU criminal law as well as the dangers and merits with effectiveness in EU context.

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In this short reflection paper, I will set out to explain how and why Sweden breaches EU data protection rules. I will start by providing a brief overview of the EU data protection framework to paint the background picture. Thereafter I will discuss the scope for derogating from the obligations set out in the GDPR and thereby test the Swedish exception and show that it is not proportionate and undermines the purpose of the GDPR. Subsequently, I will discuss why some core fundamental rights of EU law should not be possible to derogate from, when as in the Swedish case it seems to boil down to economic question of who gets to own the data. I will conclude by linking the question of the right to data protection and why licenses should not give companies a carte blanche to publish personal data about people in Sweden to the question of market access. There is an imbalanced relationship here, to use the internal market vocabulary, with Swedish people having all their private data published online while other EU states do not do that. Likewise, there is an external dimension here: the data is available on the internet globally and therefore third countries also access it.

This paper challenges established visions of EU legal enforcement by testing them in the context of criminal law theory and asks to what extent EU law can be enforced against non-compliant Member States via the use of criminal law. A main theme running through this article is the basic question of the extent to which the EU legislator needs criminal law provisions for the enforcement of EU law. The paper does this by looking at the effect of administrative sanctions and their link to criminal law sanctions. In addition, the article assesses the wider theoretical implications for the enforcement of EU law through criminal law and specifically when the values of the EU and those of the Member States are in conflict. Critically, the paper asks if the EU enforcement toolkit is sufficiently nuanced when applied in a criminal law context and sets out to chart the genesis of EU law enforcement through the use of criminal law theory. This seems particularly relevant to the discussion of enforcement in general, given that the operation of EU law essentially and chiefly concerns the values to be enforced in the national arena.

This contribution tries to highlight and scrutinize recent developments in the dynamic area of European criminal law at both the EC and EU level. In so doing the paper focuses on three judgments each providing new perspectives on, in particular, but not only, how far the Court of Justice is prepared to go in its role as integration activist; by identifying the principle of effectiveness as forming the leitmotif in the chase for constitutional evolution of European criminal law. The paper concludes, after also having discussed current legislative initiatives presented by the Commission, by asserting the need for caution and critical assessment.