Managing Sexual and Violent Offenders Across EU Borders

Abstract

This chapter discusses the challenges presented by the increased ease of opportunity for transient serious violent or sexual offenders to move across European Union (EU) borders. The Serious Offending by Mobile European Criminals project brought together a range of European Union (EU) law enforcement and probation personnel to investigate the use of existing mechanisms for information exchange available to EU Member States. This chapter focuses on how varied understandings and commitments to concepts of risk, rehabilitation, multi-agency working, and privacy and data protection influence information exchange. Several EU legislative frameworks support a proactive engagement in shared cross-border understandings of identifying who is high risk and how this information is to be exchanged. However, establishing an EU-wide commitment to such information exchange remains in its infancy. The chapter concludes by considering the impact of this tardy progression, together with the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and any assumption that ‘closed borders’ are a quick fix.