2006 discharge: European Judicial Cooperation Unit Eurojust

PURPOSE: presentation of the final accounts of EUROJUST for the 2006 financial year.

CONTENT: this document sets out a detailed account of the implementation of the 2006 budget, including the revenue and expenditure and the balance sheet for the year concerned. It indicates that EUROJUST’s final budget amounted to 14.7 million EUR in 2006 (compared with 13 million EUR in 2005) all of which is derived from a Community subsidy.

In terms of personnel, EUROJUST, whose headquarters are at The Hague (The Netherlands) had 112 in its establishment plan 93 of which were occupied and 21 others (contract agents, seconded national experts, local agents and temporary staff) which, in fact, amounted to 114 posts undertaking operational, administrative or mixed tasks. Expenditure on personnel in 2006 represented 6.412 million EUR.

EUROJUST’s main task is to organise judicial cooperation between the various national jurisdictions and, where appropriate, to act as intermediary between the national members or as a collegiate body on a whole range of priority areas. EUROJUST focuses on bilateral and multilateral cooperation operations in regard to:

• ‘standard’ cases (from 1 July 2006, a new classification for 361 cases was opened between that date and 31 December 2006): i.e. 270 ‘standard’ cases out of a total of 361;
• ‘complex’ cases: 91 out of 361.

There was a total of 771 cases (compared with 588 in 2005) dealing with the following subjects:

• fraud: 175 cases;
• drug trafficking: 170 cases;
• terrorism: 44 cases;
• assassinations: 59 cases;
• people trafficking: 32 cases.

In total, members met 89 times in the course of 2006.

It should be noted that EUROJUST’s full accounts are available from the following address: http://www.eurojust.europa.eu/adm_budg_finance.htm