Traduction de «sentenza di diritto penale » (Italien → Anglais) :

B. whereas the grounds for judgment C-176/03 state that 'as a general rule, neither criminal law nor the rules of criminal procedure fall within the Community's competence' (point 47) and (in the extraordinary point 48) that this finding 'does not prevent the Community legislator [...] from taking measures which relate to the criminal law of the Member States [...] in order to ensure that the rules which it lays down are fully effective',

– (CS) Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the consequences of the judgment of the European Court of Justice of 13 September 2005 relating to Community powers in the area of criminal law are so momentous that this judgment really marks a break in the development of Community law.

Although the ECJ proceeded very cautiously and reiterated the principle that the EC has no primary competence in criminal law and therefore that the EC Treaty only provides supplementary legislative competence in criminal law for very specific matters, the Commission seems to think that it can derive a general competence in criminal law for the EC from the Court's judgment.

F. whereas, in particular, in the abovementioned judgment, the Court of Justice, while finding that, as a general rule, criminal matters did not fall within the Community's competence, stated that that did not prevent the Community legislature, when the application of effective, proportionate and dissuasive criminal penalties by the competent national authorities was an essential measure for combating serious environmental offences, from taking measures which related to the criminal law of the Member States which it considered necessary in order to ensure that the rules which it laid down on environmental protection were fully effective,

The framework Decision covers substantive criminal law and concerns not only definitions of offences but also issues of general criminal law, such as individual criminal liability and criminal attempts [27] as well as the liability of legal persons [28].

This holds true both for differences in material criminal law as well as in procedural criminal law: even in cases where dual criminality is not fulfilled, the Member State required to enforce a decision on an act that under its own law is not an offence should find this easier to accept given that it is based on commonly agreed standards regulating who is responsible for a particular case.