| Unlike with the ICC and other international and constitutional courts that get the lion's share of credit for the "judicialization of politics", the notion of political immunity has also been challenged at the domestic level by a far more modest set of actors. Since the early 1990s, judicial actors in Western Europe---often at virtually the lowest rung of their respective hierarchies---have challenged longstanding traditions of judicial deference to political elites with new, highly proactive campaigns against political corruption. In the process, they have overturned stereotypes of civil law judges as bureaucratic, weak actors that routinely defer to political authority.;How did these relatively lowly judicial actors suddenly become so powerful? And why did prosecutorial activism against corruption and the accompanying transformation of judicial politics emerge in some parts of Western Europe while leaving neighboring legal cultures virtually untouched? I explore these questions by focusing on how judges amplified their capacity to prosecute political elites through transnational networks, which were forged in the course of investigations that required evidence from foreign jurisdictions---especially Switzerland, and Geneva in particular. However, as political backlash against increasingly resourceful strategies of judicial collaboration accumulated, these networks also became a potent vehicle for mobilization on behalf of prosecutorial independence and against political corruption.;The consequences for the ratio of power between judicial and political actors in Europe has been dramatic in some cases and scarcely perceptible in others, and these contrasts have fueled a Europe-wide debate on judicial independence, with almost exclusive emphasis on the discretion allowed to prosecuting judges. |
