Expanding the powers of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office could strengthen pan-European investigative mechanisms, including in the areas of sanctions violations and large-scale corruption.
This was stated in a comment to Guildhall by Bulgarian Member of the European Parliament Radan Kanev.
“This is a good idea,” the MEP said, commenting on the possibility of expanding the powers of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. According to him, “in general, I strongly support expanding the powers of the European Prosecutor in this direction, as well as in other directions.”
He noted that broader powers could be applied not only to matters of sanctions policy. In particular, this could concern “large-scale corruption that is not related to European funds, but still affects all European citizens.”
At the same time, the MEP stressed that implementing such changes would be a lengthy process. He recalled that “the creation of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office itself took more than 10 years,” and also pointed out that “we still have a number of member states that are not part of the European prosecution system.”
Therefore, according to him, “any expansion of the Prosecutor’s Office’s powers will take a long time.” In addition, he believes that in the context of the current Russian aggression, this issue is not a priority, since “I do not think this issue is truly relevant when we are discussing the current aggression by Russia.”
In his assessment, “we hope that this aggression will end much sooner than it will take to fully amend such a European treaty and have it approved by all member states.”
Earlier, a German MEP stated that powers to investigate violations of the sanctions regime should be transferred to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. According to him, such cases are transnational in nature and rarely affect only one EU member state, so the enforcement of sanctions decisions should be carried out at the pan-European level.
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