Off-line digital jurisdiction

The paper examines the issue of the jurisdiction over personal data from a particular angle: it aims to investigate the conditions under which European law might be competitive with other legal systems by strengthening the protection of fundamental rights such as data protection and privacy within transborder relations and, in particular, by widening the scope of European courts’ jurisdiction in such cases. The aim of the paper is to show the clash between the un-physical nature of information as commodity and the physical notion of state borders, upon which the notion of jurisdiction is based. Such endeavor explores the use of extraterritoriality of data protection and privacy in international law, with the purpose of finding broader solutions inspired to functional criteria other than the territorial connection

Knowledge, advisory and capacity building : information tool for criminal procedural rights in judicial cooperation. User manual

The protection of fundamental rights for persons accused or suspected of a crime is one of the main aims of the EU policy in the area of justice. However, the effective protection of such rights throughout the EU is heavily affected by the highly varying legal frameworks which characterize Member States regulation on procedural rights in criminal proceedings. In this context, legal actors often struggle to identify which legislation and therefore which procedural rights are applicable to persons accused or suspected of a crime in specific cases, both due to linguistic barriers and the peculiarities of different national legal systems. This situation persists also after the introduction of the EU Directives derived from the Stockholm Programme, that aim at creating a certain level of harmonized rules on the matter. Firstly, such directives often provide only a very minimal level of protection, and tackle only specific phases of the criminal proceeding. Secondly, the application of such directives at the national level is often further reducing the impact of the EU acquis due to incorrect or incomplete implementation or to the persistence of different interpretations given to criminal procedural rights by national courts.This project is funded by the European Union’s Justice Programme (2014-2020

TRIIAL national reports Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, The Netherlands

Recent constitutional and legislative changes in several member states are questioning core features of EU rule of law. For the first time ever, the EU institutions have proposed activation of the preventive mechanism in Article 7 TEU against Poland and Hungary, and the European Commission has launched the rule of law conditionality mechanism against Hungary. The jurisprudence of the CJEU finding numerous violations of judicial independence and fundamental rights undermining the rule of law in Europe is growing at a fast pace. Moreover, many preliminary references show the willingness of national courts to engage in judicial dialogue with the CJEU, relying on it to provide harmonised standards and guidelines on the rule of law. However, the future of such interactions is undermined by recent decisions of supreme and constitutional courts limiting the rights of domestic courts to use the preliminary reference procedure and prohibiting their obligation to give effect to EU law based on a tendentious understanding of national constitutional identity. In this context, the TRIIAL project has embarked on an ambitious research quest, which resulted in the present Edited Working Paper. It consists of nine country reports which cover the most relevant issues concerning judicial independence, impartiality, accountability, mutual trust and the rule of law in the jurisdictions of the project partners: Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Slovenia. The country reports primarily build on case law identified and analysed during the TRIIAL project and published in the CJC database. They outline the current state of affairs and challenges the member states face in the topics covered by TRIIAL exposing and analysing specific pressing issues, especially ones that are not yet covered in other reports such as the European Commission’s Rule of Law report.

Procedural rights through the lenses of data protection

The Chapter explores how the different legal frameworks related to the Directive 2012/13 on the right to information in criminal and eaw proceedings and the Directive (EU) 2016/680 (Data Protection Law Enforcement Directive, hereinafter “led”) intertwine, with special focus to data subjects’ rights. It aims to investigate whether the level of protection granted to suspects and accused persons can be increased or be shrunk by the trigger of data protection safeguards. Although the rationales of procedural safeguards and data protection are apparently different in scope, the Chapter argues that both affect the level of individual rights’ protection depending on how data is used for combating crimes, and that data protection may have an impact on some procedural rights as a standard setter for access to justice. This paper in fact does not argue that data protection acts as a duplication of some of the procedural rights laid down by the Directive 2013/12, such as the right to information and the right to access to the materials of the case, rather that it may be a trigger to activate a better protection for suspects, because an indirect violation of data subjects’ rights may imply a violation of procedural rights. The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in police work and Big Data Analytics as well as smart surveillance and predictive policing techniques put at the forefront the concern of this paper, moving from the idea that if evidence is based on data, data usage itself plays a key role in depicting the destiny of people who happen to be involved in a criminal proceeding. The purpose limitation principle in the field of law enforcement is extraordinarily large in scope and the main priority for someone whose data is processed for preventing crimes and possibly to build up the accusation is to know which data has been processed and for what specific purposes and regarding the scope.The Project from which this volume originates - CrossJustice project (Grant Agreement number: 847346 – just-ag-2018/just-jacc-ag-2018 just/rec mga) - was funded by the European Union’s Justice Programme (2014–2020)

Data protection : handbook on techniques of judicial interaction in the application of the EU charter

This Training Handbook provide an overview of the right to the protection of personal data and the right to privacy, provided by Articles 8 and 7 of the EU Charter. It addresses the different facets of data protection in the light of primary and secondary EU law. Moreover, it analyses in detail the interplay between data protection and cross-border digital technologies, paying particular attention to the territorial scope and cross-border data transfers as well as to the potential conflicts with other fundamental rights and interests, such as law enforcement, scientific research and property rights. The analysis is based on the exchanges with legal practitioners at the European and national level, including a variety of cases sourcing from pan European and national courts