The EU's Facilitators' Package-in the Twilight of Fighting Organised Crime and the (Over)criminalisation of Solidarity: A Comparative Evaluation

This chapter analyses the offence of human smuggling from a European and national perspective. It first scrutinises the EU legal framework on human smuggling and highlights problematic elements and inherent shortcomings. Subsequently, the implementation of the EU legal framework and the approach to human smuggling adopted by two domestic criminal justice systems, that is, Germany and the Netherlands, is analysed. This provides insights into the current scope of liability of human smuggling and furthermore demonstrates the impact of the shortcomings of the EU legal framework on national law. Based on this analysis, this chapter proceeds to discuss a recent Commission reform proposal and outlines and debates different ways in which the offence of human smuggling could be reformed.