Justice, Liberty, Security - New Challenges for EU External Relations

The European Union is rapidly creating a European space in which citizens can live in Justice, Liberty and Security. This bold push forward in the European integration process touches on three highly sensitive societal subjects: immigration and asylum, civil law, and criminal law. At the same time, work in this area necessarily has an external dimension: we only need to think about asylum and the post September 11 fight against terrorism.Within the European Union, this dynamic development of the external side of justice and home affairs raises challenging issues: friction over the division of competences between the Union and its Member States and between EU institutions; cross-pillar coordination issues; legal and political tensions due to ‘variable geometry’ with numerous ‘opt-ins’ and ‘opt-outs’. In addition, international cooperation brings its own problems: how to explain the internal issues to international partners? How to allow them to become comfortable with an ever more assertive EU role? How to support global governance structures while preserving European standards on the rule of law and the protection of human rights?Against this background, the Brussels Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and its LL.M Program on International Legal Cooperation organised a series of lectures in the winter of 2007, involving wellknown speakers from academic and professional circles as well as European institutions, third countries and international organisations. Their views have now been bundled in this book which gives an excellent overview over the many current topics in the sensitive areas of immigration and asylum, private international law and international criminal law and procedure. This book is structured in a user-friendly way and should be easily accessible to a broad audience of students, teachers, practitioners and the interested public. It is warmly recommended to anybody who wants to broaden his or her understanding of the increasing importance of the external side of European policies on Justice, Liberty and Security.