Inside Police Custody 2 regulations, and administrative provisions necessary to give effect to the respective Directives. Therefore, the project provided a timely opportunity to discover how the actions taken by member states were working in practice, and to make an assessment of whether they complied with the requirements of the respective Directives both in principle and in practice. The study builds upon earlier research projects examining procedural rights at the investigative stage of the criminal process. In particular, the study sought to adapt the methodology developed for the EU funded project that was published in 2014 as Inside Police Custody: An Empirical Account of Suspects’ Rights in Four Jurisdictions (Intersentia, Cambridge, 2014). That study also examined the three sets of rights that are the subject of this study – in England and Wales, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland. However, the fieldwork for that study was carried out before any of the three EU Directives had come into force. A further study, using a similar methodology, was carried out in three non-EU states – Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – between 2013 and 2016.2 As noted earlier, the current project was co-ordinated by the ICCL, and managed by an experienced project management team consisting of representatives from the ICCL and the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), together with the project research consultant, Professor Ed Cape of the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Both the OSJI and Professor Cape had been members of the teams that carried out the first Inside Police Custody project, and the subsequent project in Eastern Europe. The first meeting of the whole project team took place in London in September 2016. A two-day fieldwork training course for researchers from all national research teams was held, also in London, in January 2017. The training was designed to acquaint researchers with the processes, methods and research instruments to be used in the fieldwork, and to train them in those methods. A third meeting was held in Brussels in June 2018 to discuss initial results, analysis and plans for national advocacy. The project management team also held regular telephone conferences with research teams to discuss progress, and any problems arising. The research project consisted of four major elements: desk reviews; empirical research; analysis and report writing; and national advocacy. The first two elements require further explanation. Desk reviews National teams were required to research and write desk reviews regarding their national systems. The overall purpose of the desk reviews was to provide a critical, dynamic account of the system and processes in each country in the study, using existing sources of information, in order to provide a context against which data collected during the research study may be understood. The objective was two-fold: firstly, to serve as a baseline concerning the laws, regulations, institutions and procedures relevant to the realisation of suspects’ procedural rights in each jurisdiction; and secondly, to equip the country researchers with sufficient contextual knowledge to undertake the empirical work. The desk reviews also included relevant information from existing sources about criminal justice systems and processes using, for example, official and other statistics, official reports and existing research (if any). Empirical research Following the method adopted in the first Inside Police Custody project, the original plan for the empirical stage of the research consisted of three elements. See also the report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Rights of suspected and accused persons across the EU: translation, interpretation and information (Vienna, 2016); and the report prepared by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and partners, Right to a lawyer and to legal aid in criminal proceedings in five European jurisdictions: Comparative report (Sofia, 2018) (available at https://tinyurl.com/ybe3cbqe). 2 9