EU enforcement authorities are on the rise, entrusted with investigating breaches of EU law by individuals and economic actors. What are the implications for legal practice of their increasing prominence? This book explores this pertinent question from a constitutional and comparative perspective. It sets out the perimeters for composite enforcement and explores the relevant issues such as the interface between criminal and administrative law enforcement, the protection of fundamental rights and legal protection, as well as the admissibility of evidence, including unlawfully obtained evidence. Given the very real implications of the authorities' investigations, this book will appeal to practitioners and scholars, in fields from criminal law to competition and banking law.

EU law and governance have faced a new development – the proliferation of EU enforcement authorities, which have grown in number over the last 15 years. These entities, either acting alone or together with national enforcement authorities, have been investigating and sanctioning private actors on their compliance with EU law. Law Enforcement by EU Authorities investigates whether the system of control (in terms of both judicial and political accountability) has evolved to support the new system of law enforcement in the EU.

EU enforcement authorities are on the rise, entrusted with investigating breaches of EU law by individuals and economic actors. What are the implications for legal practice of their increasing prominence? This book explores this pertinent question from a constitutional and comparative perspective. It sets out the perimeters for composite enforcement and explores the relevant issues such as the interface between criminal and administrative law enforcement, the protection of fundamental rights and legal protection, as well as the admissibility of evidence, including unlawfully obtained evidence. Given the very real implications of the authorities' investigations, this book will appeal to practitioners and scholars, in fields from criminal law to competition and banking law.

This comprehensive Research Handbook investigates the success of EU law enforcement processes. Going beyond traditional analyses of administrations and courts in isolation, it focuses on the increased cooperation seen between national and EU authorities, and on the widening variety of means used to enhance compliance with EU norms.

The existence of a structured enforcement system is an inherent feature of national legal orders and one of the core elements of State sovereignty. The very limited power to issue sanctions has often been deemed a gap in the EC legal order. Over the years, the situation has progressively changed. The Union’s institutional setting is growing in complexity and a variety of agencies has been or is expected to be endowed with law enforcement responsibilities. In addition, the so-called competence creep has led the EU to play an increasingly prominent role in several areas of EU law enforcement, including the issuing of sanctions. This book examines these developments, focusing on both the general features of the EU legal order and the analysis of key-substantive areas, such as banking and monetary union, environmental law, and data protection. The work thus presents a general framework for understanding EU sanctioning based on structural features and general legal principles. Part I develops an analytical framework, tracking the most significant evolutive patterns of EU sanctioning powers. Part II adopts a more practical approach focusing on specific issues and policy areas. The book bridges a gap in existing literature and sheds new light on the relationship between the exercise of jus puniendi and the evolution of EU integration.

Controlling EU Agencies launches the debate on how to build a comprehensive system of controls in light of the ongoing trends of agencification and Europeanisation of the executive in the EU.

Retail is ‘going digital,’ and grocery shopping is no exception. While some businesses are relaying on their corporate website to make the sale, both traditional brick-and-mortar and new disruptive business models are increasingly using online marketplaces to offer their products online. European Union law has been gradually updated to reflect this new reality, with Intellectual Property Rights legislation and Consumer Law leading the way toward a suitable regulatory framework in the Platform Economy. However, the EU has not devised a comprehensive strategy for tackling the challenges posed by the online sale of physical consumer goods, such as effective public enforcement in online environments. In fact, sector-specific legislation, including Food Law, largely ignores online transactions. In this context, the book evaluates the impact that online marketplaces are having on European Union sector-specific legislation and its e-nforcement. The goal is to assess whether the existing regulatory and policy framework are sufficient for promoting compliance and bridging the enforcement gap in the digital single market. Focusing on the e-food market, the book presents a state-of-the-art overview of how online marketplaces are altering EU law and its enforcement by public authorities.

This book provides a wealth of empirical material to understand key aspects of EU governance including its plurality of actors and policy making modes and its functioning during crisis management. Authored by legal scholars and political scientists, it presents new research and insights on the role of EU agencies in the context of the Euro and migration crises. Specifically, the contributions assess why the crises have led to the creation of new EU agencies and what roles these agencies have performed since their inception; how the crisis, notably the migration crisis, has impacted on existing EU agencies; how EU agencies have shaped the policies during and after the crises; and, how the crisis has affected the accountability of EU agencies. This book is essential in understanding the intricacies of EU crisis management and the specific role of EU agencies therein, as well as EU governance more broadly. Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Multi-level governance systems like the European Union (EU) calibrate integration with member state discretion in order to implement common, yet context-sensitive solutions to shared policy problems. Research on implementation in the EU typically focuses on legal compliance with EU policy. However, this focus gives us an incomplete picture of EU implementation, its diversity and practice. The contributions of this collection represent a shift toward a more performance-oriented perspective on EU implementation as problem-solving. They approach implementation fundamentally as a process of interpretation of superordinate law by actors who are embedded within multiple contexts arising from the coexistence of dynamics of Europeanization, on the one hand, and what has been termed ‘domestication’, on the other. Moving beyond legal compliance, the contributions provide new evidence on the diversity of domestic responses to EU policy, the roles and motivations of actors implementing EU policy, and the ‘black box’ of EU law in action and its enforcement. By reassessing the relative importance of EU policy and domestic factors and actors for the outcomes of EU implementation, the results give insight into on the nuanced interplay between Europeanization and domestication forces, useful for both EU researchers and practitioners. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of European Public Policy.