Ladislav Hamran kindly asked me to compile memories about the stages which led to the creation of Eurojust. As several authors have already approached this task from an academic perspective, I decided to focus my input on a number of episodes which, thus far, have remained quite confidential. As 20 years have now passed, I considered the period of limitation to have expired.

Eurojust came into being in response to two needs:

• First, there was the need to provide mutual assistance in criminal matters and to establish a more effective instrument than those developed previously within the Council of Europe and, since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in November 1993, within the European Union. The Geneva Appeal, a desperate call made by seven European judges in October 1996, highlighted the distress of those who were having to fight organised crime with outdated instruments. I can remember the frustration of one of the signatories to that appeal, who described the sense of solitude he felt when he issued international letters rogatory: 'When I send an international letter rogatory, I feel what Robinson Crusoe must have felt whenever he threw a bottle into the sea: I do not know if it will ever be picked up, if the message that it contains will be read or, much less, if anyone will ever reply.'

• Second, there was the need to balance the interaction between the police and the courts. The Maastricht Treaty (on the initiative of Chancellor Kohl) established Europol (Article K.1(9) TEU). In most Member States, with police work under the authority and control of the prosecution service, it seemed necessary to establish a 'sister' agency to balance the creation of Europol. I also find it very telling that in French, Europol is male and Eurojust is female!

The origins of Eurojust, like all good ideas, are multifarious. I played my part alongside many partners in crime, as it were, who are now my friends: Hans Nilsson, Clemens Ladenburger, Charles Elsen, Emmanuel Barbe, Lorenzo Salazar, Claude Debrulle, Daniel Flore, Gisèle Vernimmen, and many more.

It took several attempts to convince the Member States that it was necessary. Of course, tragic events such as the 9/11 attacks consolidated the political will, but it called for a little amount of guile, as the short history that follows shows.

As far as I recall, the first attempt to create a European judicial cooperation unit dates back to the Belgian proposal presented at the informal meeting of Ministers for Justice in Limelette in September 1993. The Belgian Minister for Justice at the time, Melchior Wathelet, for whom I served as head of Cabinet, made a proposal to his colleagues about setting up a centre for information, discussion and exchange ('CIREJUD'), which was inspired by the asylum and immigration centres (CIREA and CIREFI). Unfortunately, this proposal did not receive the approval of all the Member States and remained on the shelf.

The second attempt came three years later. After an Irish journalist, Veronica Guerin, was murdered in June 1996 while reporting on organised crime, the President of the European Council suggested to colleagues to set up a high-level group with a view to establishing a European strategy to fight organised crime. As the director in charge of these matters in the General Secretariat of the Council, I was tasked with proposing ideas for reform to the Presidency. My assistant, Hans Nilsson, resurrected the idea of creating a judicial cooperation agency as part of this process. Unfortunately, once again, the proposal did not receive enough support within the Council.

Three years later, the third attempt did succeed. For the first time, the European Council had decided to devote an entire meeting to justice and home affairs in view of the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam. This facilitated taking a broad community approach on the issues of asylum, immigration and external border control, and it substantially overhauled the functioning of intergovernmental cooperation in internal security. A wonderful surprise came when the Finnish Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen, and his Permanent Representative, the late Antti Satuli, gave me the task of drafting – in the utmost secrecy – the draft conclusions of the European Council. I had complete freedom to add all the good ideas I could gather from the Member States and the Commission. Under the authority of my Director-General, Charles Else, and with the help of Clemens Ladenburger and Hans Nilsson, I was able to promote, in addition to the creation of Eurojust, many reforms such as enshrining the principle of mutual recognition, eliminating extradition and replacing it with what eventually became the European Arrest Warrant, as well as the harmonisation of a series of crimes, including terrorism, just to mention a few issues related to the criminal field.

With respect to the creation of Eurojust, I had to overcome three obstacles:

• The first obstacle was to convince Commissioner Antonio Vitorino, who was in charge of justice and home affairs. The main difficulty was that Antonio Vitorino's colleague, Michaële Schreyer, responsible for protecting the Community's financial interests, was promoting the Corpus Juris project, led by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty, to create a European Public Prosecutor to protect the financial interests of the Community. I went to see Antonio Vitorino to make sure that he would not block my intention to include the creation of Eurojust in the Tampere conclusions. He told me that he shared my belief that it was too soon to introduce a European Public Prosecutor (it required the mechanism of enhanced cooperation to create it some 10 years later!), and that it was preferable not to limit the competences of this new agency to only protecting financial interests but to expand it to include all forms of serious crime. Out of courtesy for his colleague Schreyer, Antonio Vitorino told me that he would not officially support the creation of Eurojust, as certain people in the Commission regarded this proposal as a way of blocking the plan to set up a European Public Prosecutor's Office, but that he would not object to it either. On the contrary, Antonio Vitorino shared my belief that it was important to proceed in stages and that the creation of Eurojust, if the Agency demonstrated its added value, would naturally lead to the creation of a European Public Prosecutor. The events that followed proved us right...

• The second obstacle was to convince the Finnish Presidency. As I mentioned above, I had considerable freedom to make proposals. However, the Finnish Presidency did not regard the idea of establishing a judicial cooperation agency as being necessary. The reason for this was that, under the Finnish system, neither a public prosecution service nor an investigating judge is involved in carrying out investigations and prosecutions – a bit like the British model, whereby the investigation is conducted exclusively by the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service only intervenes at the end to check that the case is strong enough to go to court.

• The final obstacle was to convince the Member States. Some were sceptical about whether such an agency would be useful as they were satisfied with the recently created European Judicial Network. Others feared that this Agency was just the first step towards creating the European Public Prosecutor's Office.

I, therefore, had to be a little crafty. The Finnish Presidency had naturally decided to devote the informal meeting of Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs, held in Turku one month before Tampere, to gathering ideas from the ministers about what should be submitted to the Tampere European Council. I had prepared a questionnaire for the discussion on the first morning, with questions intended to prompt the Ministers for Justice to support the idea of setting up Eurojust. To my great surprise, even though I had spent the evening before the ministerial meeting asking those I knew best to promote the idea, none of them brought it up. During the break, I went to see the German Minister for Justice, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who had heard talk about Eurojust from a German judge, Wolfgang Schomburg. She promised to speak in the afternoon, which she did, based on a speech prepared by her staff with the assistance of Clemens Ladenburger. At the start of the afternoon, thanks to the friendly relationship I had with the late Daniel Lecrubier, the then Head of International Cooperation at the French Ministry of Justice, and with Michel Debacq, then an adviser in his cabinet, I succeeded in convincing the Minister for Justice, Elisabeth Guigou, to support her German colleague. All the other ministers then spoke in support of setting up Eurojust, and this helped me to convince the Presidency to add the proposal to the Tampere draft conclusions.

As the establishment of Eurojust had been agreed upon in principle by the Tampere European Council on 15 and 16 October 1999, the four successive presidencies of the Council (Portugal, France, Sweden and Belgium) submitted a draft decision drafted mainly by Hans Nilsson. Negotiations on this draft decision started in early 2000, under the Portuguese presidency. They were long and arduous. The issues were certainly complex, but I despaired at the pace at which the work was progressing.

An idea struck me one evening after a day of unproductive discussions. Why not suggest proceeding, just as the Ministers for Home Affairs had done in 1995 when setting up Europol? While waiting for the adoption of the Convention on the establishment of Europol, the Council had decided to create a provisional unit – the Europol Drugs Unit (EDU) – to make the technical preparations for the launch of the Agency. As the French Presidency approached, I drafted a note on the idea to Minister Elisabeth Guigou, and I sent it to her via the Jacques Delors 'Notre Europe' Foundation. Elisabeth Guigou very cleverly proposed the idea during the informal meeting of Ministers for Justice in Marseille in July 2000. The ministers agreed to send one judge each to Brussels, from the following September. I took it upon myself to welcome them to the Council buildings, which proved to be a very good idea. First, because the appointed judges started to work together and reflect on how the Agency would operate once established; and, second, because they were even more enthusiastic about taking part in negotiating an instrument to establish Eurojust since they were eager to become the first members of its College. This helped to speed up negotiations considerably.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks gave significant impetus to the negotiations. A political agreement was reached in the Council on 14 December 2001 and the decision was formally adopted on 28 February 2002.

The final step was to set up the legal framework for the creation of Eurojust. This was achieved, also on the initiative of Elisabeth Guigou, during the adoption of the Treaty of Nice with the insertion of Article 29(2) into the TEU.

Hans Nilsson and I then met with the members of Pro-Eurojust for strategic discussions in a beautiful setting, in La Converserie, in the Belgian Ardennes. The participants' enthusiasm and creativity were remarkable.

This short history illustrates the power of networks. It shows once again that Europe was not built all at once, but it is built in stages.

I had the privilege and good fortune to work very closely with the successive presidents of Eurojust. The Agency met the expectations that its many creators had placed on it. In fact, since 2015, no terrorism investigations or prosecutions have gone ahead without the involvement of Eurojust. In such a sensitive area, this just proves how much the Member States trust Eurojust.

For my part, I am eager to follow the successes of Eurojust over the next 20 years!

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