Ethical EU eJustice: elusive or illusionary?

EU institutions and member governments are committed to realising judicial cooperation as part of a strategy to guarantee and sustain security in the EU: the freedom, security and justice agenda. The three elements clash both in terms of their prioritisation, their mutual compatibility and their feasibility. The phrase judicial cooperation evokes ideals of value-free, neutral cooperation designed to produce justice. It is supposed to be a public good. Yet judicial cooperation in practice is anything but neutral: it is a political minefield. While the EU goals of pillar III – promoting sustainable freedom, security and justice – enjoy broad public support, why do the implementing measures and objectives to improve security appear to produce opposite effects to those intended? Why does ejudicial cooperation in particular aggravate suspicion that the end-product will be anything but ‘just’ and fair? Is eJustice a chimera in the making and ejudicial cooperation elusive? Judicial cooperation (a term used as shorthand to embrace cooperation among all the agencies involved in combating crime, including legal, customs, immigration and police agencies) exemplifies the clashes and dilemmas central to egovernance in general, epitomises the difficulties in claims-making regarding making judicial cooperation in practice acceptable to an increasingly distrustful citizenry, and highlights the urgent need to combat the public diplomacy failure on liberty and security at a time when ICT applications bring the EU evercloser to the citizen while simultaneously aggravating the trust deficit. Is this especially problematic in respect of judicial cooperation because government Info, Comm & Ethics in Society (2006) 3: 131-144 © 2006 Troubador Publishing Ltd.