The Protection of Fundamental Rights within the AFSJ; Through or Against Mutual Trust and Mutual Recognition?

In the internal market within which the principle of mutual recognition originated, there was no need for a grand principle of mutual trust to counterbalance the potentially far-reaching consequences of mutual recognition.The creation of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) led to a change of paradigm, however. Mutual trusts suddenly came on stage in the field of judicial cooperation, stealing the limelight from the principle of mutual recognition and provoking the latter's transformation. Against this background, this article examines the intertwinement of the principles of mutual recognition and mutual trust within the AFSJ and their relationship with fundamental rights. It is recalled that recognition is concerned not with fundamental rights but with integration. By flanking mutual recognition with the new principle of mutual trust, the CJEU and the EU legislator sought to foster mutual recognition on the basis of a virtuous, yet illusory, argument that (all) fundamental rights are equally safeguarded by (all) the Member States. In the early years of the AFSJ, the protection of fundamental rights was meant to be ensured through a combination of mutual recognition and mutual trust. Recently, however, the CJEU and the EU legislator have taken a more realistic approach by dispensing with the need for mutual recognition in exceptional circumstances where there is a failure to observe fundamental rights. On its face, that change suggests that the protection of fundamental rights may actually be at variance with mutual recognition and mutual trust. The main claim of this paper is that, within the framework of the AFSJ, a high level of protection of fundamental rights will be achieved by combining harmonisation with mutual recognition based on solid mutual trust grounded in reality. This calls for a major (re)thinking of the function and content of mutual trust in order for the latter to be at the service of mutual recognition