The Shift from an Intergovernmental Organisation to an EU Agency: What Consequences on Europol’s Institutional Trajectory?

Europol’s creation as an intergovernmental organisation in 1995 has raised numerous critics from the European and national hemicycles. Yet, Europol’s governance has been the object of an important reconfiguration due to its transformation into an EU agency with the 2009 decision and the 2016 regulation. Despite their remaining specificities compared to the ex-first pillar agencies, these legal bases have reinforced the prerogatives of the European and national parliaments. Therefore, such growing powers should have led to a speed reduction of Europol’s growth, notably by the use of sanctions. Quite surprisingly, this was not the case and this communication offers to understand why. Firstly, I assume the relevancy to nuance the liberal nature of parliamentarian in order to explain the limited impact of the rule change on policy outputs. In national parliamentary regimes, Parliaments tend to support their government, while the composition of the European Parliament needs to be seized to shed light on its institutional behaviour. Consequently, I suppose the potential reluctances to Europol’s expansion have become even more difficult facing the growing concerns of European citizens in matters of internal security. In this context, national governments have tended to favour the expansion of security actors, from their own initiatives or from the Commission’s ones which has turned out to be a major support to Europol’s autonomisation. Secondly, in order to grasp this parliamentary behaviour, I offer to use the distinction made by some scholars between control and accountability which can imply formal and informal interactions. Henceforth, by considering Europol as an accountable agency towards parliaments, its current operational mutations could be thought as autonomisation and not independence, and could appear more compatible with the liberal stances of those institutions.