EU–Wide Letter of Rights in Criminal Proceedings: Towards Best Practice

The research project: “EU-Wide Letter of Rights in Criminal Proceedings: Towards Best Practice” has  been recently finished and the results were presented at the ECBA 2010 Autumn Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The significance of the project was underwritten by the Stockholm Programme’s Roadmap and the proposed directive by the European Commission to implement Measure B of the Roadmap by means of a Directive on the right to information in criminal proceedings (which can be found here). This proposal for a Directive includes a Letter of Rights similar to the one devised in the course of the project. Said proposal for a Directive is currently (December 2010) under discussion by the Member States.

The project, initiated by the Federal Ministry of Justice of Germany, received a grant from the European Commission provided by the Specific Programme on ‘Criminal Justice’ in 2008 other financial support came from the Federal Ministry of Justice of Germany. Other partners to the project include the Ministry of Justice Austria, the Council of Europe, the European Criminal Bar Association and the Deutscher Richterbund. The ECBA was represented by Prof. Dr. Holger Matt who was an active Advisory Board member to the Project.  Some ECBA members assisted by checking the translation of the Model Letter of Rights in their native language, as the model was translated to all 23 official working languages of the EU:

• Bulgarian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• Gaelic
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Maltese
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Slovak
• Slovene
• Spanish
• Swedish

The research was carried out by Prof. dr. Taru Spronken, Maastricht University, with the assistance of Liesbeth Baetens, Junior Researcher, Maastricht University and Anna Berlee, Student-Assistant, Maastricht University over the course of 2009 and 2010.

The results of the project have been published in a book by Intersentia and an electronic copy can be found here.