National sovereignty has been the key consideration for basing judicial cooperation in the European Union on mutual recognition. More than one decade after the creation of the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ), this contribution assesses whether mutual recognition-based EU legislation in civil and criminal law indeed respects national sovereignty. To this end, it studies the Framework decision on the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), the EU’s flagship instrument in the AFSJ. We distinguish two elements of national sovereignty: (a) the protection of the State and its basic structures (its statehood); (b) the State’s values, principles and fundamental rights (its statehood principles), and assess the EAW from a dynamic perspective: from its initial inception, in which mutual trust primarily implied little interferences with the laws and practices of issuing states, to the current state of affairs which is marked by what could be called a ‘mutual trust supported by harmonization’- approach. Especially in the judge-driven harmonization of the EAW and the dialogue between judicial authorities we witness important (and oftentimes overlooked) elements that impact national sovereignty. At the end, the findings of the article are put in the context of the current rule of law crisis in the EU.

The European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC requires all European Economic Area (EEA) jurisdictions to provide an equivalent regime protecting the privacy and other fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons in relation to personal data processing, whilst also shielding media expression from the default substantive requirements as necessary to ensure a balance between fundamental rights. Through a comprehensive coding of the derogations set out in each jurisdiction's data protection laws, this article provides the first systematic analysis of whether this has in fact been achieved. It is demonstrated that there is a total lack of even minimal harmonization in this area, with many laws providing for patently unbalanced results especially as regards the publication of sensitive information, which includes criminal convictions and political opinion, and the collection of information without notice direct from the data subject. This reality radically undermines European data protection's twin purposes of ensuring the free flow of personal data and protecting fundamental rights, an outcome which remains largely unaddressed by the proposed new Data Protection Regulation. Practical suggestions are put forward to ameliorate these troubling inconsistencies within the current process of reform.