This valuable book brings together a range of difficult materials on EU counter-terrorism law, renders them easily digestible with an attractive sureness of touch, and then serves them up to the reader with a consistent scholarly perspective that adds immeasurably to critical understanding. The 31st in Hart's Modern Studies in European Law series, the book is a model of the sort of monograph that young scholars seeking to turn their early research into field-leadership should be seeking to do. It is also impressively ahead of its time: coming before the Snowden revelations of quite how far counter-terrorism has been prepared to go, Murphy's book both prepares us for shocks like this and suggests a way that Europe can (and should) react.

The main thrust is that as a result of pressure from the aptly misdescribed “war on terror”, the “trend in both the US and UK” and – centrally for this book – the EU “has been towards pre-emptive intervention that attempts to eliminate threats to national security before they arise” (p. 3). Where once the criminal model had been about punishment and – at a stretch – prevention (all those inchoate offences), now it was about robust anticipatory action to stop stuff well before those who might have been responsible for whatever it would be had got into their stride. Murphy's point is a profoundly important one, for the pre-emption model is “an enabler of government action” (p. 12), driving the law into the liberty of the individual far more than the old criminal law approach used to do. The “control of coercive power is shifted … towards executive, administrators and private actors” (p. 12) changing the nature of the target, with offences being “drafted more broadly to catch behaviour that may not cause harm but may offer support or encouragement to those that do seek to do harm” (p. 12) and with new forms of “incapacitation” also making their appearance: “preventive detention or the freezing of financial assets” (p. 13), and it could be added much else besides.

A lot of this, though elegantly expressed in Murphy's book, is well-known. What is particularly valuable, though, is its application to the EU. The “rule of law” is “a politico-legal ideal to which constitutional systems, and the EU in particular, aspire” (p. 13). Importantly for the argument here it is also “an umbrella term for a collection of legal principles, which, if upheld, lead to a better legal system and one that is more respectful of the inherent dignity of its subjects” (p. 13). The thesis is that the EU's counter-terrorism law, rooted in pre-emption, “amounts to a failure to live up to the politico-legal ideal of the rule of law” (p. 13). Is this true? On the evidence presented here the answer is a resounding yes. Murphy starts by spending some time in the first two chapters setting the scene, going through the nature of the EU's counter-terrorism action and then analysing European rule of law principles along lines developed by Armin von Bogdandy. So far as the latter is concerned, the idea is that the rule of law is the possessor of “constitutive” and “safeguarding” aspects, the first being about creating a legal order, the second looking after people within that order, with each being challenged by the drift displayed in the direction of EU counter-terrorism law towards executive power. These opening sections have the feel of a PhD candidate playing himself in, covering the general stuff and the literature before going for the boundary shots that are, as a result of all this hard work, there for the taking.

The chief strength of the book, and the main reason for reading it, lies in the five chapters that make up Part II which, though only one of three parts, in fact makes up about two-thirds of t he whole. These dive into the detail of EU counter-terrorism law, proving the thesis. The first covers the way in which terrorism has been criminalised in EU law, how “broadly and imprecisely drafted” (p. 74) these laws have been and how in combination “they undermine fundamental legal principles” (p. 75). The second addresses the unsatisfactory nature of the EU's anti-money laundering laws and also its rules on counter-terrorist finance. These legal initiatives pre-date 11 September 2001 but of course have been immensely enhanced by the new urgency that followed the attacks of that day. “Targeted Asset-Freezing Sanctions” (p. 115) is the third field of study, a related area to what has just gone before and one that likewise pre-dates 11 September, but deserving of the special attention given here. The famous case of Kadi makes its appearance (albeit not Kadi II, decided after publication) but the main virtue of the detailed treatment is that, first, you get a feel for the whole story (UN included) and, second, the lesser cases get a look in, like Möllendorf (p. 135) where even a registration of the transfer of an ownership fell foul of a newly arrived controlling regime (“a sale of immovable property must not be completed if Community law has meanwhile frozen the economic resources of the buyer” as a contemporaneous web site put it: http://www.libertysecurity.org/article1659.html). The fourth case-study on data surveillance is a well-informed snapshot of what we knew – which was bad enough – before we became aware of the unknown unknowns brought to our attention by Edward Snowden. The law is pretty complicated and Murphy does a good job of critical navigation, explaining what is going on while not losing the capacity to stand back, almost amazed at what we now tolerate. The final of these substantive chapters treads over fairly well-trodden ground, European arrest warrants and related investigative tools, but by now the reader is confident that this author knows what he is doing, and indeed there is a neat spin to the treatment of the material, with an argument emerging about the mechanisms here (rooted in the “old” criminal model) being most usefully used as “a counterpoint to the narrative of the pre-emption” (p. 214). As Murphy points out, the talk in this field is all not about terrorism, and this makes a difference to how much we are prepared to allow the mechanisms under study at this point to intrude into our liberty – the criminal perspective leads us down the traditional path (of which Murphy approves: the rule of law doing its work effectively) while talk of terrorism takes us down that quasi-militaristic road marked pre-emption, of which of course he disapproves.

I think Murphy is right about the direction the EU law is taking: as he says there is a shift and its “tenor… is towards pre-emption” (p. 219). I think he is right too that this is a bad thing for European citizens, and (of course) for non-citizens within the European space. A final substantive chapter spells out in a succinct way why this should be the case – and in doing so refuses also to avoid the key question of whether or not the shift that is being described is inexorable, the move to pre-emption permanent. Here Murphy makes a vital distinction between showy moves to supra-legal executive power – President Bush as commander-in-chief; Mr Blunkett and his indefinite detention; and others – and those “instruments of pre-emptive counter-terrorism” which “use less overt and more insidious systems of control” (p. 235). The first can be ended, with courts combining with popular opposition to achieve results – this remains true even though Murphy's main example of it, Guantanamo, is not the historical footnote that he believed it would be when he was writing up his conclusions, presumably in the glow of President Obama's first term. But the second is “much more difficult to oppose” (p. 235), being a far harder nut to crack, hiding its aggressive hostility to freedom behind layers of complexity and alienating Euro-babble. It is vital first to expose in order then to be able to engage in effective critique. In this book Murphy has triumphantly done both.