Background
Measures which sought to harmonising extradition rules across EU member states go back to the mid 1990s when the EU institutes two treaties under the Maastricht Treaty which sought to streamline existing extradition procedures under the European Convention on Extradition. In 1999 the European Council further proposed to abolish formal extradition procedures for sentenced persons. However it was not until the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the United States that much more far reaching proposals were mooted. While originally proposed as an anti-terrorist measure the European Arrest Warrant soon became to a wide range of ordinary crimes. The political decision to adopt the EAW legislation was made in at the Laeken European Council in December 2001, the text being finally agreed in June that following year.
The European Arrest Warrant was established by an EU Framework Decision in 2002. Framework decisions were legal instruments of the second pillar of the European Community akin to directives and only takes effect when implemented in an EU member state by transposing it into domestic law. The European Arrest Warrant replaced the 1957 European Convention on Extradition (ECE) which had previously governed extraditions between most member states, and various legal instruments which had been adopted to streamline the process of extradition under the ECE such as the agreement of 26 May 1989 between the 12 member states, on the simplification of the transmission requests for extradition, the Convention on simplified extradition procedure between 1995 and the Convention on Extradition of 1996 and the provisions of the Schengen Agreement regarding extradition.
The EAW Framework Decision came into force on 1 January 2004 in eight member states, namely Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. By 1 November 2004 all member states had implemented the legislation except Italy, which did so on 22 April 2005. Bulgaria and Romania implemented the Decision on their accession in 2007.
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