Repensando a extensão da confiança mútua para proteção dos direitos fundamentais no Direito Penal Europeu: in trust should we trust?

Currently, European Union faces the so-called ‘rule of law crisis’ and the digital age challenges, being that it is imperative, to address Member States cooperation, mutual recognition and trust, and the consequences of these times in the protection of fundamental rights under European Criminal Law. Some of the conditions that support this trust have been shattered, due, in particular, to the lack of judicial independence and prisons conditions of the issuing Member State’s national courts and authorities. Still in the field of criminal cooperation, the protection of personal data has been assumed as a notorious concern of the European Union, motivating the current institutional debate on cross-border access to electronic evidence. Because European Union is not a sovereign State, it is understandable that national differences in criminal matters can be mitigated with instruments of approximation structured around this idea of mutual trust. However, these challenges have shown that mutual trust cannot mean blind trust, revealing the inevitability of rethinking the current framework for judicial cooperation in criminal matters.