Europol's horizons between European cooperation, procedural sovereignty and the risk of evidence without a territory

Europol's transformation from an information-exchange centre into a European infrastructure for analysis, cloud services and public-private cooperation accentuates a structural tension. The Union may organise police cooperation and the circulation of information, while the exercise of coercive powers and the safeguards governing the gathering of evidence remain entrusted to the Member States; the police function also remains distinct from the intelligence function. This article reconstructs the conflict that emerged from the EDPS's 2019 inquiry into large datasets, the 2022 reform, the litigation concerning EncroChat, Sky ECC, ANOM and Matrix, and proposal COM(2026)580. It argues that the risk does not depend solely on the physical location of servers, but on the loss of functional control over investigative and pre-investigative data: legal basis, controllership, purpose, segregation, keys, logs, chain of custody and defence access. Two case studies, Seity and CIRA4PREV, are then used to assess possible alternative architectures, without attributing to technology the ability to cure deficiencies in authorisation, proportionality or adversarial process.