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Access to justice and sound financial management both play essential roles in maintaining citizens’ trust in their EU institutions. We share with the Parliament a belief in strengthening the concept of European citizenship and the rule of law. Recently we have devoted a significant share of our resources to auditing how the EU and its Member States deal with legal and illegal migration.

As the EU’s auditors, we also look ahead in order to help address key challenges facing the EU in future. How the EU and its Member States deal with migration to Europe will remain high on the political agenda. While migratory flows are well below their 2015 peak, the protection of EU borders from illegal migration and the integration of migrants into our social, economic and political systems are likely to remain priority issues. Traditionally, the EU has been a standard setter in the area of data protection and, in 2018, a new legal framework came into force. In the years to come, new technologies and scientific progress will however pose new legal, ethical and social questions for policymakers.

Within the criminal justice system, for example, artificial Intelligence could be used for face recognition, risk assessment and predictive policing. At the same time, it will bring challenges in the form of transparency, accuracy and civil rights concerns regarding privacy.

We will keep all these factors in mind when selecting our audit tasks and formulating recommendations for the future.