Justice and Home Affairs cooperation in the European Union has evolved in increasingly variable and unpredictable environments. Evolution and altered conditions more often than not represent both an opportunity and a need for initiating observations, reflection about the past and thinking ahead and bettering what exists. This is, indeed, the case with the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) – that is, the institutional architecture that emerged following the partial Communitarisation of the Justice and Home Affairs pillar of the Maastricht Treaty (1993), which was agreed during the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference and which culminated in the Amsterdam Treaty (in force as of 1 May 1999). A moment of reflection is needed not only because the AFSJ is ten years old, but also because The Hague Programme, successor to the Tampere Programme that laid down the policy priorities in this domain and was agreed by the European Council in November 2004, is about to expire. Preparations for its new five-year successor, the Stockholm Programme, have been made and, in anticipating the European Council's meeting in December 2009, the European Commission published a communication on ‘An Area of Freedom, Security and Justice serving the citizen’ in June 2009 (Commission Communication 2009). The communication seeks to make the policy priorities of justice and home affairs cooperation more balanced by stating explicitly that ‘the priority now has to be to put the citizen at the heart of this project’ (Commission Communication 2009: 2).

Although the new ‘citizen-oriented’ approach is a welcome development in light of the restrictive and security-based focus of discourse and policy that prevailed since the adoption of The Hague Programme, the absence of references to ‘Europe's Others’ – that is, migrants, third-country national border crossers, asylum seekers and refugees – is puzzling. In any case, the communication outlines what the European Commission perceives to be the major successes of member state cooperation during the last ten years: the removal of controls at internal borders; the management of the EU's external borders in a coherent fashion; progress towards a common policy on immigration – that is, the existence of ‘rules that make legal migration fairer and easier to understand’; the adoption of an EU framework on migrant integration; ‘stronger action being taken against illegal immigration and human trafficking’;