Legal Framing in the External Dimension of the EU’s Internal Security: How NGOs Derailed the Europol Agreement with Israel

Despite the recent interest of EU scholars in framing the EU’s external relations, we still know little about the role of law in framing processes. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s juridical field concept and the broader literature on framing, we develop a novel concept of legal framing comprising both agency and structure. This interdisciplinary approach enables us to show how frame entrepreneurs exercise their agency through identifying legal problems, proposing legal remedies and appealing to the EU’s self-understanding as a “community of law”. At the same time, we take into account the doctrinal aspect of the law as understood and shaped by the epistemic community of legal practice and identify key scope conditions for successful legal framing. Empirically, we demonstrate the relevance of legal framing by the Palestinian human rights NGO “MATTIN group” during the negotiations of an Israel-Europol cooperation agreement. Although a draft agreement was successfully established in 2010, the process has later become stalled due to the MATTIN group’s strategies of legal framing, arguing that the EU has overlooked key legal issues in the negotiation process, notably with regard to data transfer from Israel to Europol. Relying on internal discussion notes, minutes of various meetings and on several expert interviews, we show how the MATTIN group’s sound legal advocacy successfully activated the structural power of EU law which even actors with opposing political interest have found difficult to ignore.