Brussels, 18/04/2002 (Agence Europe) - The Justice and Home Affairs Council could decide on 25 April to ease its method for harmonising criminal sanctions, in the hope of facilitating work on harmonising criminal legislation. The Permanent Representatives of the Fifteen were working Thursday evening at smoothing out the last difficulties. They were to mark their agreement at moving from a harmonisation based on a common minimum threshold in the form of a determined number of years to a minimum threshold in the form of a range of several years. So far, the Fifteen had decided that for a certain type of act, the maximum sentence that could be inflicted on a delinquent or a criminal would be at least x number of years. For example, they decided that each Member State had to provide for a prison sentence of at least 8 years for participation in a group of terrorists, and at least 15 years for directing a group of terrorists. This so-called minimum/maximum system was very criticised by Member States from Northern Europe, who regarded that it was not flexible enough and endangered the coherence of their own national legal order. This opposition came essentially from Austria, Germany and Denmark, and to a lesser extent Finland and Sweden. On several occasions, it slowed down or threatened to slow down work on the harmonisation of the incrimination of terrorism, for example. Last December, the Council had already agreed on the principle of moving from a system based on scales, and compromised between an even more flexible system requested by Austria and Denmark, and the stance of most Member States, satisfied with the current system.
The harmonisation of sentences would now be by adoption of a "level" of sentence, which was discussed on Thursday at Coreper on the basis of the Presidency's proposal: Level 1: the offender may receive a prison sentence of between 1 and 3 years; Level 2: between 2 and 5 years; Level 3: between 5 and 10 years; and Level 4: at least ten years. This would not prevent the Council, under specific circumstances, from deciding on a minimum/maximum sentence of over ten years, or, in other cases, of limiting itself to calling for an "effective, proportionate and dissuasive" penalty to be applied. France hopes to restrict harmonisation to sanctions for cross-border crime and Finland calls for lower "ranges", European sources say. The first application of this new system could be carried out the day it is adopted, with the political agreement on the framework decision on combating the sexual exploitation of children (see previous article).