ABSTRACT
In recent years, the European Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission have frequently emphasized the importance of police, customs and judicial cooperation among the member states in controlling organized crime in the European Union (EU), particularly where protection of the financial interests of the European Communities (EC) is concerned. Furthermore, the European Parliament and the European Commission have highlighted the need for a more supranational approach because existing forms of cooperation, despite all kinds of measures to make them more effective, have insufficient impact. The Parliament and Commission have been unwilling to hold back with the orchestration of this approach until there is no longer any disagreement about the need for it. On the contrary, these bodies, for some time, have been advocating not just the establishment of communitarian customs but also the creation of a European Prosecutor's Office and, separately from the continued development of Europol, the transformation of the Unite pour fa coordination de La Lutte antifraude at the European Commission (UCLAF) into a communitarian bureau of investigation. The progression of judicial cooperation in the EU, therefore, clearly forms part of a more general development: the creation of a targeted and integrated policy in the EU against organized crime, whether this jeopardizes the financial interests of the Communities or not.
