This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about
But there is always risk no matter what you do.
To be honest I haven't done the setup for sending a handful of emails but IPs sending hundreds/thousands per day it's fine as long as you don't start spamming people and get flagged.
Even then, there's no interesting conversation to be had unless we pretend it does.
I personally found some interesting comments here, including but not limited to services based off EU that I can use.
If you find it uninteresting, you should stop wasting your time in it and go do something more productive with your time.
Unless, of course, you just want to do some "concern trolling". You know, the "just asking questions" and "just noticing" behavior.
I'll be charitable and presume you are talking in this thread accidentally, and will find your way to more productive activities instead.
What?
Currently it's just smaller pieces and no bigger agenda is visible (or even exiting). But there are constantly new regulations that would make an authoritarian coup (like currently in the US) easier.
The EU is just one AfD win away from doing the same thing. It's not immune to this issue either, you have the same problem happening right under your noses.
Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.
It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:
1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.
2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.
3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals
There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.
The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.
Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.
Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.
See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.
We can cross our fingers and hope that nobody would work with them (I know that Germany's parties all have a pinky promise not to work with AfD), but it was only 10 years ago that everyone in the US was laughing at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – and now here we are, much sobered. These things happen, and AfD, or RN, or whoever, could wreak havoc to the EU from within the EU if they took power and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs and more.
Except the Swiss.
So it would be incredibly hard for a political entity like AfD or RN to gain full and absolute power like the orange has achieved. Even in the worst cases, those parties usually only have ~30% popular support at most, which usually translates to at most ~30-40% of seats in parliament. Which means they cannot even get parliamentary majority, and probably can't get head of state either.
Americans just like to pretend things aren't that bad and they aren't the only ones falling into the abyss.
Who does this weird proposals like Chat Control?
AFAIK, it is not "alt-right" parties - so it really does not clicking for me, why AfD and others constantly brought in during online privacy discussions?
(I am not from US, please keep that strawman out)
And then you have all kinds of charlatans that are basically Orban doubles. You hear the same stupid talking points and bullshit, the same cozying up with Putin. And to top it off, the USA has openly vowed to fuel and fund that fire of self destruction, so the billionaires can eat the corpse. Because that is where the term conservatism came from, to conserve the power of the king and the ruling elites, as a god given construct (the only original moral aspect of conservatism).
A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.
It is ok for parent to make claims, that is not considered politics and those comments remain, but if someone else presents links with view that counter that it gets deleted.
Noted.
Again this is a false equivalence, 'a little less marked' isn't close to imparting the true state of things and to be honest a little disingenuous.
The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states. The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.
So 'ah yes but Hungary' doesn't persuade me even though I'll concede it's a problem for the EU. If Tisza is elected in April, Hungary will be on course to turn things around. So you're comparing 1 out of 27 to 50 out of 50 states.
I wish there was an easy way for me to bet against the imminent fall of the United States as predicted by so many internet commenters. I don’t like what the current administration is doing, either, but I would readily bet against all of these “the end is just around the corner” or “the empire is dying” takes in a heartbeat.
It's already slid in to 'electoral democracy' instead of 'liberal democracy' the difference between the two is how 'rule of law' is prioritised and the balance between checks and balances between institutions is enforced.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf
But it is? They forced Romania to do a re-election because they didn't like the candidate. And they still try to force Chat Control, try to bypass the unanimity rule and the EU commission gives itself more powers every day with authoritian laws like the DSA. As a European, I don't get the USA's EU-fetish. It's not better here than in the US.
Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.
Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.
Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.
From e.g. Wikipedia:
>At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
D'oh!
>That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen
How convenient he got fired, everything is good now, surely the Commission does not hold the same views as him! Are you really this naive?
And don't get me wrong, I support neither Georgescu (a typical conspiracy theorist nut) nor AfD (who only argue that the evil immigrants are at fault). But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place. If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
> And don't get me wrong, I support neither
It is not about who you support and what your favorite color is.
We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
Maybe keep your US nonsense to yourself?
The way this particular part of our system works is downright horrifying, but it's exotic enough that very few people (even lawyers) will be familiar with it.
I’m not particularly patriotic or bothered about nations in general, but the yanks can go take a hike.
By the way, sex him off? Trying to decipher the number of characters
If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.
I'm not trying to say anything about anyone else besides the EU. Therefore I'm certainly not trying to compare EU to anyone else.
I am an European pointing out issues with the local system, issues that many commenters here clearly aren't aware of given how many replies seem to think that they'll be just fine as long as they don't host in Hungary.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/since-20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/17/refugees-jew...
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
I think we can probably agree that this number is not very accurate.
Between 2021 and 2025 (inclusive), Wikipedia lists 68 dead in Germany versus 5882 dead in the US, despite the US only being ~4 times larger. More people have been killed by police in the US this year than in Germany in the past ten years, and it's not even April yet.
What a disingenuous comment. Do we really think that is the case?
You ignored my other link. Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry. Yet, Denmark gleefully does that.
Funnily, I had friends from Europe participate in the No Kings protest here, while coming from countries that have literal kings.
This is either disingenuous or misunderstands the nature of European constitutional monarchies.
The US literally deports people to concentration camps in countries with no civil liberties. Many have disappeared there. A whole other group have been raped and become pregnant and are being moved around to force births.
And you are concerned about fucking jewelry. Genuinely, are you taking a piss here?
There are four times as many people in the US.
Germany has four cities with around a million people.
The U.S. has at least 15.
Also, absolute numbers don't reflect justified shootings, which is an entirely different and much more nuanced conversation.
No part of this should be taken to mean that I don't think there's a problem in the US, I just object to complex issues being overly simplified.
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
EAW = European Arrest Warrant
EIO = European Investigative Order (basically lets different jurisdictions demand information from each other)
CJEU = Court of Justice of the EU (think of it as a supreme court)
That being said, I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal professional, this is not a legal advice.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
Let's hope elections there will change Orban into something saner.
An LLM can probably find some better links though.
Dual criminality requirement only applies to non-Annex D crimes. Which is... not many crimes. You seem awfully confident for someone so ill-informed.
>And of course, we all know this is not happening
How would you know that it isn't happening? EIOs are not public!
Not sure what to make of the claim that Hungary might theoretically be enforcing Hungarian law in France. It seems surprising that no-one has noticed any specific consequences of this that you can point to.
The EIO is mostly just a formalization and standardization of a bunch of ad-hoc processes that were already in place. Law enforcement agencies in different European countries do try to assist each other, on the whole.
Now foreign authorities are trusted by default and significant parts of their reasoning are not subject to review, that's bad.
Like, yeah, your EIO will be rejected if you don't tick any of the crime-category boxes in the form.
I'll repeat: EIO
You can look at the history of EAW related litigation also, it'll probably prove most informative. Executing states used to constantly deny requests due to judicial review, rules were clarified to remove the possibility of judicial review by executing states.
https://greatjames.co.uk/martin-henley-secures-the-dismissal...
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.
This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.
So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
that does not imply one being the subset of the other to me, if anything they are clearly defined and therefore clearly separate.
Trump refuses to answer simple questions and attacks and mocks reporters, that's if they're lucky and he doesn't directly sue them for millions/billions. Hell, the white house banned Associated Press. Is that free speech or freedom of the press?
None of this says anything about Americans' right to speak freely, which is absolute, unlike in any European country.
Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".
European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.
And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
"Crowded theater"? In any case, yes, that's a popular understanding of limits on free speech in the US, but it's actually been superseded twice - first by "clear and present danger," then by "inciting or producing imminent lawless action." These days, it's probably (I am not a lawyer) legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater under many circumstances.
> Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
There are no laws preventing you from saying anything in the US, unless you are specifically, directly inciting people, at that moment, to do things that break other laws. That's the point. You can't measure it in terms of degrees of restrictions; the US has none, and all European countries have at least some. The latter approach opens the floodgates to restrictions on any kind of speech that the government doesn't like. The US Constitution prevents that from ever happening.
Sounds like there are some of those laws. You covered them with "unless"
Oh please. There's free speech without a free press (US ranks 57/190, behind Sierra Leone) people are just amplifying the same BS they heard from some ignorant influencer. I would argue even your idea of "active enforced blasphemy laws" shows that. That's worse than useless, that is detrimental to a society (case in point, the current president and his whole cabinet).
In a very narrow interpretation, yes. Everyone with a modicum of common sense would realise that countries with laws on the books against offending religions / inciting hatred against them are still more free than a country where the fucking Bible is cited in court rulings and political speeches, and where there are active laws prohibiting non-religious people from holding office.
One is for keeping the peace, the other is actively meddling religion and politics.
> baseline level of freedom of speech
Being unable to spout Nazi ideology is technically a restriction on freedom of speech, yes. But again, anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a bit of historical understanding) would understand this to be a good thing.
This is an aspect of our country that I think most Americans are proud of. Some relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
How did that end last time? We know where it ends, we know there's nothing redeeming. Nobody needs Nazis, there is nothing to be gained by engaging with them or giving them a platform.
Truly exceptional indeed. You are basically on par with China.
On a national level, sure.
Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.
Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation. Is that a big victory for the rule of law? I think not, the national governments should not be knowingly violating the ECHR in the first place.
Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional at best.
The whole deal with Chat Control is also not to be forgotten. I do think you guys see this place with rose tinted glasses sometimes.
I agree with you that both of those laws are stupid, but that's a completely separate discussion to what I'm claiming above.
Does it allow blocking half the internet during football games?
It almost certainly does not: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-115705%...
AFAIU this is common because lower courts often deliberately choose to not try to interpret ECHR, leaving that for appeals courts.
But now we're straying even further from my original argument which boils down to "laws mean something" into arguing the intricacies of how laws are supposed to be changed. I'm not interested in having that discussion, as it has nothing to do with my original claim.
ECHR decisions are certainly not mere recommendations.
>It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so
ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
The only thing ECHR cares about is one piece of "legislation", which is not a law, but a declaration (Declaration of Human Rights), so that you have some sort of internationally recognised body to go to whenever you feel that your local judicial system has done you injustice. That is all it does. That is all it is meant to do. That is the sole reason of its existence. It is not a legislative body at all.
> ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
It can't. You're either making things up or severely misunderstanding the court. It can say "this law doesn't align with the Declaration" and that's it. The law still exists. ECHR relies on signatories being willing to make the necessary changes themselves. Some are and get right on it, some aren't. The election law in my country has lost 5 cases in the ECHR and not a single one of the verdicts are fixed as of now, the oldest of which dates back to 2009. This is horrible, I want to see them fixed, but ECHR can't force us to fix it and we as in the country face 0 consequences for not addressing any of them (as of yet).
There is a separate court called European Court of Justice which is the equivalent of the US supreme court and is tasked with interpreting EU-wide laws and making sure national laws are aligned as much as possible. That is a legislative body with an enforcement mechanism. ECHR is not, you don't know what you're talking about.
My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.
We've already seen with Brexit that 100% control is not needed in a parliamentary system to destroy a country's livelihood. But my point was that AfD doesn't need something like "presidential control" of the EU, it would just need to start working with other far-right parties in the EU such as Hungary and France's RN to sow chaos from within. Is that very far-fetched? You can't tell me that most of Europe doesn't hold its collective breath at every French election, crossing their fingers that Le Pen's party doesn't win this go around.
It's not hard to imagine what kind of damage they could do to the EU if they took power in Germany and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs, etc.
> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.
> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.
> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...
Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
> - actual incidence is low
> - it's not being reported
> - it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
Fourth possible cause:
- the EU has 24 official languages
i.e. when it is reported, the number of people who are actually capable of understanding the reporting is only a fraction and rather localized.
It's a problem. But it has technical rather than political solutions.
EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?
So, with the police? YMMV.
In the US the cops actually need a search warrant signed by a judge. In the EU they only sometimes need one.
>Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there
Really? I've always been under the impression that it is courts who issue search warrants in Singapore, not the police or prosecutors.
Also, what you're describing is still infinitely better than the European system! The cops get to issue the warrants themselves.
What you are claiming about European cops is also not uniformly true. A German police officer cannot "just" self-issue a search warrant.
Yes. The more worrying situation is that Hungary can just decide that their police officers can self-issue search warrants, and then send those around the EU in the form of EIOs.
However, usually it works more like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carles_Puigdemont#Arrest_in_Ge...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carles_Puigdemont#Arrest_in_It...
Usually LE in European countries will not respect warrants from another country if it does not make sense in the local jurisdiction as well.
Rebellion is not one of the EAW listed offenses, so it would require German approval. Same is not true for most crimes.
Italy? I assume the prosecutor there told the Spanish there's no way the Rebellion will stick, and the Spanish told the Italians to just drop it.
I assume they'll keep him listed on the SIS in case they get a hit in some friendlier jurisdiction.
>Usually LE in European countries will not respect warrants from another country if it does not make sense in the local jurisdiction as well.
This is incorrect and goes explicitly against the intent of the relevant frameworks.
"On 5 April 2018, the Oberlandesgericht (Higher State Court) in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein ruled that Puigdemont would not be extradited on charges of rebellion, and released him on bail while deliberating about the extradition on charges of misuse of public funds."
So, exactly as I wrote: The rebellion charge did not make sense to the court, so no extradition due to that. On the other hand they found that they could do something with the charges of misusing public funds (and thus needed longer to decide about it). If Spain had not dropped the EAW, Puigdemont's legal team would have had an opportunity to challenge any decisions of the court.
In general it is no fun if another EU country issues an EAW against you, but anything making no sense will be thrown out by the local EU country's courts and you have every chance to go against the decisions of the court.
That's rather rude of you, I did in fact read the entire text of the link.
I hate citing wikipedia, but if you'll skip forward a few lines, you'll find this nugget:
"On 12 July 2018 the higher court in Schleswig-Holstein confirmed that Puigdemont could not be extradited by the crime of rebellion, but may still be extradited based on charges of misuse of public funds"
Puigdemont would have almost certainly ended up extradited, but he would enjoy the EAW protections which would presumably not be desirable for the Spanish government.
>>Usually LE in European countries will not respect warrants from another country if it does not make sense in the local jurisdiction as well.
>
>This is incorrect and goes explicitly against the intent of the relevant frameworks.
But in the link you could clearly see that the court dismissed the EAW on charges of rebellion. If Spain had only issued the EAW based on this charge, or if Spain had issued two separate EAW for the separate charges, this is clearly showing what I was claiming.
What you have cited only confirms what I was writing earlier - if it makes sense to the court they might follow-up with the EAW. I am not sure at all, though, how you come to the conclusion that Puigdemont "almost certainly" would have ended up extradited. It is not given that the court would have found the charges valid and there are all legal means available to challenge the court's decision.
But even if he had been extradited due to the charges of misusing public funds, whatever is wrong with that? There are extradition treaties between many countries and that would be an absolutely valid case for extradition, if the charges make sense in the local jurisdiction. Should every criminal be safe as soon as they are crossing a border?
The important thing is that a court is checking the charges and that there is legal recourse, before any extradition.
So, in summary I feel not threatened at all by the existence of those instruments in the EU and you failed to make me understand why I should. The chance of an abuse of power or unjust persecution in any single country (EU or not) is so much larger than a scenario where this happens in two countries at the same time.
However, this is a bit exhausting, so I am done with this discussion.
Yeah, variations of "did you even read the link" are rude. Yours was perhaps particularly aggressive.
>But in the link you could clearly see that the court dismissed the EAW on charges of rebellion. If Spain had only issued the EAW based on this charge, or if Spain had issued two separate EAW for the separate charges, this is clearly showing what I was claiming.
"Another important advantage of the EAW compared to extradition proceedings is that for 32 categories of offences, there is no verification on whether the act constitutes a criminal offence in both countries. The only requirement is that the offence needs to be punishable by a maximum period of at least 3 years of imprisonment in the issuing Member State."
The dual criminality check does not apply to most crimes. It did apply in the basically unique case of "rebellion", but the EAW largely did away with dual criminality checks.
>It is not given that the court would have found the charges valid and there are all legal means available to challenge the court's decision.
There are no meaningful legal means to challenge the validity of the charges in the EAW process, the entire point of the process is to skip that. You get to challenge the validity of the charges after you've been extradited and brought in front of the courts of the requesting country.
>But even if he had been extradited due to the charges of misusing public funds, whatever is wrong with that?
Specifically in Puigdemonts case I do not wish him extradited as I doubt he would be treated respectfully in Spain. But his case is obviously one-of-a-kind.
>There are extradition treaties between many countries and that would be an absolutely valid case for extradition, if the charges make sense in the local jurisdiction. Should every criminal be safe as soon as they are crossing a border?
EAW is completely different from regular extradition treaties.
>The important thing is that a court is checking the charges and that there is legal recourse, before any extradition.
The whole purpose of EAW has been to get rid of as much legal recourse as possible, and over time various CJEU decisions have been further eroding practices some national courts had established.
>you failed to make me understand why I should
You'll probably receive better replies in the future if you avoid the unnecessary personal attacks.
Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.
Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.
Those procedures are written in blood
Just now, like today, a decision was made that cops who literally made up a gang to go after innocent people ... wont be investigated.
Pretending you found proofs legally when you did not is easy. Especially when you are untouchable. And the rule does absolutely nothing to protect innocent people. It is just trying to make up for one injustice by creating another smaller one.
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
Only sort of, because some countries have very weird ideas of what a "judicial process" is.
>I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That's fair, but I think it's a mistake. In the worst case the European system grants a village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever, a far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
I obviously don't share the sentiment.
> village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
> far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
If you think some policeman in a rural Frech village is a bigger threat to your freedom than NSA or other 3-letter agencies from the USA, we can all see who is mistaken in evaluating threats.
> Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever
I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
Just like the random mugger on the streets of Paris is a far bigger threat to my life and limb than the US with their drones.
You're talking from an ideological perspective, I'm looking at this from a rather more practical angle. It's very possible that your line of thinking leads to a better outcome than mine, or perhaps it doesn't.
>I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
It's really not that funny, cryptocurrency thieves have been bribing cops to rob people at gunpoint https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/crooked-cops-stolen-lapt...
Now you can bribe a village cop in Hungary or Romania, and have the French cops do your bidding. This is totally gonna end well!
Given your participation in this whole discussion, that was pretty cute.
There nothing else here even worth addressing. This conversation is a waste of time, for both of us.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
It's harder for me to worry about the NSA than people who have already negatively impacted me in the past.