Inside Police Custody 2 5. Conclusions and recommendations 5.1 Conclusions The objective of the EU procedural rights programme is to establish minimum standards governing key aspects of criminal procedure across member states. The rationale was to enhance the trust on the part of criminal justice actors that is necessary to facilitate mutual recognition of judgements and judicial decisions, and police and judicial co-operation. No less important was the need to reassure citizens that the EU will protect and guarantee their fair trial rights. The Directives issued under the procedural rights programme, which were adopted following extensive consideration and discussion amongst member states and other interested parties, require state authorities to introduce the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to give effect to the provisions contained in them. The reference to regulations and administrative provisions is an implicit recognition of the fact that laws alone are not sufficient to guarantee effective implementation of procedural rights. Whilst appropriate laws are a pre-requisite, if suspected and accused persons are to be able to exercise their procedural rights on a routine basis, such laws need to be supported and underwritten by appropriate regulations, institutions, procedures, protocols, resources, and professional cultures that embody an understanding that procedural rights are rights of suspected and accused persons. The research reported here, which was primarily funded by the European Commission, and also by the Open Society Justice Initiative, was designed to seek data on, and to understand, how the procedural rights encompassed by the first three Directives adopted under the procedural rights programme work in practice. Those three Directives – on the right to interpretation and translation, the right to information, and the right of access to a lawyer – deal with procedural rights that are fundamental to a fair and just criminal process. The research, which was carried out in nine EU member states between September 2016 and December 2018, sought to establish and describe the legal norms relevant to those three Directives, and to explore how they operate in practice. In order to do this, the project team adapted the methodology used in a previous European Commission funded study, which entailed conducting observations in police stations (including in police interrogations), observing the work of lawyers, and interviewing key criminal justice personnel. In this way, objective data could be obtained on the routine practices that provide the context in which the rights covered by the Directives are experienced. Access to police stations for the purposes of the research was successfully negotiated nationally in four of the member states, Austria, Lithuania, Romania and Slovenia. The national authorities in Spain would not grant access, but the authorities in the Basque region of Spain were willing to do so. Despite repeated attempts by the national research teams and the project management team to secure access in the remaining countries - Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary and Poland – the relevant authorities, both the police and relevant government ministries, would not grant permission for researchers to conduct observations in police stations. This lack of transparency was disappointing, not only because it limited the researchers’ ability to obtain data on how procedural rights actually work in practice, but also because it meant that the relevant governments and institutions missed an important opportunity to obtain valuable information which might have enabled them to be assured that procedural rights were being effectively implemented or, on the other hand, to discover ways in which they could be improved. Two examples of the value of observational research, concerning the letter of rights, will suffice. In Lithuania, the law requires that the letter of rights be served at the time of arrest, or at the beginning of the first interrogation. Observations 56