Police and Judicial Cooperation in Europe Up to the End of the Second World War

INTRODUCTION In the literature on the history of police and judicial cooperation in Europe, far more attention has been devoted to police cooperation than to judicial cooperation. The explanation for this lies not only in the fact that the former is a more exciting subject in some respects, particularly from a political perspective, but also in the reality that there was more substance to police cooperation than judicial cooperation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, the following narrative naturally contains more detail about the former than the latter. Section 2.2. covers the regular forms of cross-border police and judicial cooperation in the nineteenth century, but also includes a discussion of the attempts that were made by the individual states to improve the structure of both forms of transnational cooperation during that century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Section 2.3 examines the foundation of the International Criminal Police Commission [ Internationale Kriminalpolizeiliche Kommission ] in 1923, its burgeoning around 1930 and its demise in Nazi Germany. There are several reasons for devoting so much attention to the early history of the institution known today as Interpol. One is that this institution has played a steadily greater role in the worldwide investigation of serious cross-border crime. Another is that in some respects Interpol must be regarded as the forerunner of Europol in the European Union. Finally, section 2.4 presents a concise review of the discussions held in the League of Nations on the question of whether it was desirable or necessary to form a permanent police force to enforce that institution's decisions, in particular decisions that were designed to avert war or the threat of war or to manage conflicts in the wake of wars. The present-day relevance of that discussion follows naturally from the fact that today the European Union regularly deploys police missions to conflict zones in North Africa and the Middle East for just those purposes. IN THE SHADOW OF THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE THE FIRST ATTEMPTS TO ORGANISE POLICE COOPERATION The Correspondence on the Borders and High Policing [Haute Police] under J. Fouche There can be no doubt that the history of systematic cross-border police cooperation in Europe can be traced back to the system of policing that was established during the period of the Napoleonic Empire.