Inside Police Custody 2 Executive summary In 2009 the European Union (EU) adopted a ‘roadmap’ of procedural rights in criminal proceedings, with the aim of introducing EU legislation covering a range of procedural rights for suspected and accused persons, to come into force over a number of years. 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 first three Directives adopted under the programme – on the right to interpretation and translation, the right to information, and the right of access to a lawyer – came into effect in October 2013, June 2014, and November 2016 respectively. Under the Directives, member states were required to introduce the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to give effect to the provisions contained in them. The research reported here, which was primarily funded by the European Commission, and also by the Open Society Justice Initiative, is the first to examine the implementation in practice of all three Directives. The research was carried out in nine member states - Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Spain – between September 2016 and December 2018. Using an empirical method, the research sought to obtain data not only on the laws and regulations adopted by the respective countries, but also on how the procedural rights actually work in practice. The research method used was adapted from that used in a previous study, also funded by the European Commission, published in 2014 as Inside Police Custody: An Empirical Account of Suspects’ Rights in Four Jurisdictions (Intersentia, Cambridge). The aim was to use observations in police stations, including in police interrogations, and interviews with key criminal justice personnel which, together with baseline information obtained by desk reviews of domestic laws, regulations and procedures, would provide a nuanced account of how procedural rights are experienced by suspected and accused persons in real cases. 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.1 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, in effect, provided the basis for the first, and possibly the most important, research finding; that the authorities in some countries are unwilling to expose their institutions, particularly the police, to objective research designed, not to criticise, but to discover how an important set of EU-wide standards work in routine cases. The Directives require member states to transmit the measures adopted to give effect to them to the European Commission. The authorities in all of the countries in the study complied with this obligation. However, the value of this requirement is limited because the national authorities do not have to provide It should be noted that whilst references are made to Spain in the Executive Summary, the research was conducted only in the Basque region, and whilst some laws referred to are applicable nationally, regulations and practices reported by the researchers may not be valid throughout Spain. 1 4