ABSTRACT
Cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) seeks to engage European Union (EU) Member States in efforts at European-level policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum, police, and judicial co-operation and is one of the newest competencies of the EU. Because of the sensitive nature of the issues involved, Member States have been reluctant to relinquish their sovereign prerogatives to determine who will cross their borders and when, and have initially been loathe to allow binding decisions to be made in Brussels. In this setting, non-governmental actors have found it difficult to penetrate the policy-making cycle. Beginning in the mid-1990s, and bolstered by the developments that yielded the Maastricht (1993) and Amsterdam (1999) Treaties, the EU has become much more active in the JHA field. So, too, have non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
