The Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: "Towards an EU Criminal Policy: Ensuring the effective implementation of EU policies through criminal law"

The Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: "Towards an EU Criminal Policy: Ensuring the effective implementation of EU policies through criminal law" (COM [2011] 573 final) On 29 th September, 2011, the European Commission published the aforementioned Communication.Though just a "communication" without any legal significance, the paper contains highly important guidelines in relation to the role criminal law is meant to play in a European context in the future.It attaches far greater importance to criminal policy decisions at the EU-level andin generalcontains a new strategy to be adopted by the Commission in relation to the use of criminal law.Uniform principles and sample language shall be applied in order to create consistent and coherent criminal law.The fundamental importance of the concept and ideas laid down in the Communication deserve to be taken seriously and must be discussed thoroughly (see also Editorial, p. 209).For these reasons, the editors wished to print an excerpt of the Communication in this issue of EuCLR. EuCLRThe Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament 311