The Hague: Eurojust has spent the last six months guiding national prosecutors through the most operationally invasive review of the European Arrest Warrant since the instrument entered into force in 2004, an exercise that is now feeding into the Commission’s preparations for what officials in Brussels increasingly describe as a regulation rather than a refresh of the original 2002 framework decision. The agency hosted its annual coordination meeting on the warrant earlier this spring in the Dutch administrative capital and used the occasion to circulate a stress-test methodology that asks issuing authorities to pre-screen requests against three friction points the Court of Justice has crystallised over the past decade: detention conditions, judicial independence in the executing state, and proportionality at the issuing end.
The exercise is significant because it formalises the trajectory the Court has been steering since the Aranyosi and Caldararu ruling in 2016 obliged executing courts to refuse surrender where systemic prison conditions create a real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment. Subsequent judgments in LM and L and P drew the same logic into the area of rule-of-law backsliding, requiring executing authorities to test whether the issuing state can guarantee an independent tribunal in the specific case. The most recent ML and OG cases on Italian and Bulgarian detention pushed the principle further still, leaving Member States to manage what one senior Dutch prosecutor at the meeting described as a constant compliance exercise rather than a clean transfer procedure.
Commission services are circulating an inception assessment around a possible 2027 legislative proposal, although the exact form remains under discussion. The simpler option would amend the 2002 framework decision through a new instrument under Article 82 of the Treaty, codifying the case-law tests into procedural safeguards that issuing courts must apply before transmitting a request. A more ambitious version would consolidate the warrant alongside the European Investigation Order, the European Protection Order and the presumed innocence rules into a single regulation, an architecture that several capitals consider operationally cleaner but politically difficult because it touches sensitive national procedure.
Resistance is concentrated, predictably, in capitals that have most often appeared on the receiving end of refusal decisions. Warsaw and Budapest have signalled that any consolidation must not entrench what they describe as a presumption against their judicial systems, while Bucharest has pushed for a separate strand on detention infrastructure financing through the Justice programme. Northern Member States, led by the Netherlands and Germany, want explicit recognition of the proportionality principle so that minor offences no longer trigger cross-border surrender procedures, an issue that has plagued the warrant since requests involving bicycle thefts and unpaid kerb fines first raised eyebrows in The Hague’s chambers a decade ago.
Eurojust’s own data, due in its mid-year operational note, will shape the political room available for the Commission. The agency recorded just over 18,000 surrender requests in 2024, the highest annual figure on record, with execution times still averaging close to sixty days where consent is withheld. The pattern suggests volume is rising even as friction multiplies, which is the strongest practical argument for codification. Member State representatives meeting in the Justice and Home Affairs configuration of the Council in late June will receive a Commission non-paper outlining options for the instrument, with the file expected to receive a public political airing during the second half of the year as the Polish presidency prepares to hand over to Denmark.
The exercise is being watched closely by defence counsel networks and by national bar associations, which want minimum guarantees of legal aid for requested persons regardless of jurisdiction. Their argument, that the warrant cannot remain a mutual recognition shortcut while procedural rights diverge inside the Union, is increasingly accepted by the institutions. Whether that consensus translates into a substantive instrument before the end of the legislative term remains the open question, and one Eurojust officials will not be drawn on publicly while the consultation phase is still running.
