ABSTRACT
The chapter takes the EU–Japan Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement as a case study to analyse the EU’s success in pursuing its Art. 3(5) Treaty on the European Union (TEU) mandate of upholding and promoting its values and interests, and to what extent the EU effectively relied on norm diffusion for this purpose.
The EU has arguably been at least partially successful in exporting its legal standards on ‘improved judicial cooperation’ in the text of the Agreement, especially including a legal basis for acquiring testimony via videoconference whilst upholding its interest in security; and in including clauses allowing it to uphold its values with regard to respect for fundamental rights. In particular, by having a clause that allows the EU to refuse assistance if the death penalty is involved, the EU has arguably not only acted as a norm exporter but set a new international legal standard through which it also hoped to promote its values by triggering a change in Japan’s retentionist policy.
However, an analysis of ten years of implementation of the Agreement reveals a more nuanced picture, highlighting how important it is to look at both the norm emergence and the norm socialisation phase when assessing the success of the EU as a norm exporter.
The institutionalisation of EU–Japan MLA cooperation through the conclusion of the agreement has triggered a marked increase in the volume and speed of cases, contributing to greater security. However, the implementation of EU legal standards on acquisition of evidence in practice and the promotion of the EU abolitionist agenda still face legal, practical and cultural obstacles.
