The European Council representing the European Union member states and their governments is becoming an arena through which questionable practices are expanding. Procedures are being developed in cooperation with EU agencies such as Frontex and Europol that appear to undermine existing limitations that result from international human rights frameworks and constitutional prescriptions at a national level that supposedly apply. This enables problematic policies and practices at the national level arising from security and immigration policies that the EU might have curbed to be elevated into the EU’s structures, undermining its progressive potential.
Analysis of policy making at the European level loses relevance if it is treated in a vacuum, without linking it to the national level where its effects are played out, resulting in successive developments based on normative assumptions that fail to adequately take the reality that they produce into account. These forms of cooperation undermine the role and the possibility to intervene by institutions including the European Commission and European Parliament and the scope for human rights or civil liberties concerns to influence developments.
