Abstract
The European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) has been so far the most ambitious project in the field of Europeanization of criminal law. Criminal law has traditionally been an area where the member states of the European Union are strictly guarding their sovereignty and they are very reluctant when it comes to its harmonization or perhaps unification.
This is also the reason why it is important to closely focus on this newly created institution. This is the very first time the EU member states established a body with a competence to investigate and prosecute crimes across countries regardless of national borders.
According to the adopted legal framework, the European Chief Prosecutor located in Luxembourg is to focus primarily on crimes affecting the EU's financial interests. The EPPO is to investigate and prosecute these crimes and to represent public prosecution before national courts.
The greatest added value of the EPPO should be its independence from national public prosecutor's offices in member states. Independence, expertise, and a cross-border competence should save dozens to hundreds of billions of Euros to the EU's - and nationals - budgets.
These amounts of money are being lost every year due to cross-border financial crimes, mainly due to subsidy frauds, tax frauds, or other frauds, due to active and passive corruption, or due to money laundering. The ambitions and expectations from the newly established office are quite huge.
However, when we focus on the adopted legal framework and future functioning of the EPPO, we discover many questions, ambiguities, and gaps that raise lots of doubts if the EPPO will be able to fulfill the ambitions and expectations. The aim of this master thesis is to draw attention to these ambiguities and to suggest possible solutions.
In addition, the thesis is focused on EPPO's organizational structure, its powers and competences, procedural issues related to investigation and prosecution or its external relations. Last but not least, the thesis also provides an analysis of the impact of the establishment of the EPPO on the legal order of the Czech Republic.