DigiRights: The digitalisation of defence rights in criminal proceedings (2022-2025)

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee is a partner in the international research project DigiRights, coordinated by the Institute of Criminology of the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven). The project runs from 2022 to 2025.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalisation took place with astonishing speed in many areas, including criminal proceedings. In this area, the digital transition often takes place without sufficient consideration of the legal and practical requirements to ensure the equivalence of procedural rights offline and online. Digitalisation continues to change the dynamics of criminal justice in the post-pandemic era. This provides an opportunity to assess how technology can best serve the needs of both prosecution and defence.

The DigiRights project focuses on the procedural rights affected by digitalisation, such as the right to interpretation and translation, the right to information, the right to a lawyer and the right to be present at the trial, and will map and assess current digitalisation practices that affect these rights in order to propose necessary European guidelines. The aim of the project is to promote the digitalisation of criminal proceedings in a way that ensures the uniform and full application of procedural rights and provides a uniform and adequate level of protection throughout the EU. The project examines these issues in an international comparison in six EU Member States: Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Croatia. The results of the legal and empirical research will be summarised in country reports and an international comparative study. Based on the research findings, the DigiRights project will also formulate recommendations for national and EU authorities and law enforcement agencies.

Funded by the Justice Programme (JUST) (2021–2027) of the European Union. Project No. 101056667. The products of this project represent the views of the author(s) only and are their sole responsibility. The European Commission does not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information they contain.