"In a common judicial area," said Frieden, "criminal convictions must be applied without obstacles based on national territory considerations," noting that on this occasion, some tragic events have demonstrated the deficiencies of the mechanisms in place to give a full cross-border dimension to criminal sentences.
Frieden emphasized that the Council had already decided to draft an emergency measure to improve and accelerate the sharing of information on national criminal records. In this regard, the issue involves the legal effects that one state must grant for convictions handed down by foreign jurisdictions.
During the debates among the ministers, two approaches were considered. First, the approach that involves the approximation of legislation; and second, the approach that involves mutual recognition. The vast majority of ministers approved the concept of mutual recognition while underscoring that it must be limited in scope. Thus, this cross-border mutual recognition of criminal convictions will require a national criminal court to take into account all criminal convictions handed down in another member state of the Union, just as it takes into account a criminal conviction handed down in the past by one of its own courts.
A certain number of national delegations supported the Commission's proposal that seeks to create a "European index system," which would be a genuine system for automatically and directly accessing information to determine if a person has a criminal records. The Presidency requested that more work be done on this proposal. Such an "index system " should make it possible to identify the state in which a person has a prior criminal record, and would be supplemented by a mechanism of exchanging additional information between the competent national authorities.
