Criminal Law
See also: Area of freedom, security and justice#European crimesIn 2006, a toxic waste spill off the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, from a European ship, prompted the Commission to look into legislation against toxic waste. Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas stated that “Such highly toxic waste should never have left the European Union”. With countries such as Spain not even having a crime against shipping toxic waste, Franco Frattini, the Justice, Freedom and Security Commissioner, proposed with Dimas to create criminal sentences for “ecological crimes”. The competence for the Union to do this was contested in 2005 at the Court of Justice resulting in a victory for the Commission. That ruling set a precedent that the Commission, on a supranational basis, may legislate in criminal law – something never done before. So far, the only other proposal has been the draft intellectual property rights directive. Motions were tabled in the European Parliament against that legislation on the basis that criminal law should not be an EU competence, but was rejected at vote. However, in October 2007, the Court of Justice ruled that the Commission could not propose what the criminal sanctions could be, only that there must be some.
Read more about this topic: European Union Law
Famous quotes containing the words criminal and/or law:
“The attorneys defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful ghastliness of his deed to his advantage.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)