Teaching activities

In the context of the Jean Monnet Chair, three existing taught undergraduate courses will be reformulated and redesigned to build a solid knowledge-base on EU law, with focus in EU criminal law, EU cooperation in criminal matters, the EU initiatives against money laundering and the financing of terrorism and the EU strategy on asset recovery of criminal proceeds. A new fourth undergraduate course will be introduced dealing with more specialized topics in this area, such as the harmonization of substantive and procedural criminal law, the European Investigation Order, the European Arrest Warrant, the role of Europol and Eurojust, etc.

• Law of the European Union I: Compulsory undergraduate course, 6 ECTS
• International and European Criminal Law: Elective undergraduate course, 6 ECTS (new course)
• European Comparative Law: Compulsory undergraduate course, 6 ECTS
• Investigations: Elective undergraduate course, 6 ECTS

Curriculum upgrades for the courses include (a) integrating contemporary issues and challenges related to asset recovery in the EU (b) integrating research output (c) integrating discussion with experts and the wider public (d) integrating a specific theme each year to ensure the coverage of key sub-topics of the core theme of the Chair; in the first academic year (2020-2021) the sub-theme will be EU asset recovery and illicit trades (drugs, arms, cultural goods, etc); in the second year (2021-2022) the focus will be on EU asset recovery and the proceeds of corruption; in the last year (2022-2023) the sub-theme will be the future of EU asset recovery in the post-Lisbon era. A multi-disciplinary approach will be adopted, since international asset recovery involves several fields of study (economics and finance, international politics and diplomacy, public administration, financial investigations/forensics, etc).

The teaching activities, compatible with the strategic mission of the NUP School of Law, aspire to enhance the quality of EU studies by enriching the content of courses with the latest EU legal developments and by teaching students to work with EU legislation and case-law. In that regard, the teaching activities promote EU studies at NUP as the host institution, which also supports other initiatives in this domain (newly approved LLM program on Criminal Justice and Financial Crime)