Negotiated settlements for corruption offences

EU Member States must continually review their anti-corruption policy and regulation to ensure that they provide effective, proportionate and dissuasive criminal penalties to protect the financial interests of the EU. Best practices from other countries can provide guidance. The US practice of negotiated settlements for corruption offences has proven to be of growing importance and the spread of such settlements as a mechanism for anti-corruption enforcement in other countries raises the question of how the EU should respond to this development. Do negotiated settlements align with the particular character of European criminal law enforcement systems? What socio-economic, political or legal factors affect the use of negotiated settlements in Europe? National rapporteurs and experts considered such questions in order to evaluate the practice of negotiated settlements from a European perspective at a 2014 seminar on Negotiated Settlements for Corruption Offences: A European Perspective sponsored by the European Anti-Fraud Office and The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Their findings are presented here in this volume.Contributing national rapporteurs are Alan Bacarese, Paola Mariani, Arkadiusz Matusiak, Anna Oehmichen, Maud Perdriel-Vaissière, Claes Sandgren, Gerben Smid, Tina Søreide, Karolina Stawicka and Karin van Wingerde. Paul Arlman, Hans de Doelder, Jan Eijsbouts, Sharon Oded and Jaap de Zwaan provided expert opinions.