Lurking were there laws to prevent people such as Arnis Zalkans coming here?
eulawanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/free-movement-of-murderers-eu-law.html
Free movement of murderers? EU law aspects of the Alice Gross case
First of all, how could a convicted murderer move to the UK? He had served his (absurdly short) sentence under Latvian law, so was not a fugitive from justice. But that doesn’t mean that he had the right to move to the UK, or any other Member State. Although UKIP leader Nigel Farage has claimed that ‘We can’t stop people like this entering the country’, this is simply not the case.
The starting point here is the EU’s citizenship Directive, which governs the free movement of EU citizens between Member States. Free movement is not unlimited. Among other things, the Directive provides that free movement can be denied on grounds of ‘public policy, public security or public health’. This applies to entry, exit and stay in a country. The law states that a criminal conviction cannot automatically justify blocking free movement rights, but there is a proportionality test to be applied on a case-by-case basis.
Given that murder is the most serious crime, and that Mr. Zalkalns’ conviction was quite recent, there is obviously an extremely strong case that he could have been refused entry. If he challenged the refusal, it’s hard to imagine that any British court, or the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), would have been sympathetic.
So why wasn’t he refused entry? Presumably because the UK authorities weren’t aware of his murder conviction. There are EU laws on the sharing of criminal records, but they applied only from 2012, some time after he entered the country. In any case, they wouldn’t have helped, since they only oblige the Latvian authorities to inform the UK about any convictions of British citizens in that country.