who cannot afford to pay privately for a lawyer at a higher risk of being held in detention, due to inadequate legal representation. Such issues were identified in Romania and Italy. • As in Romania (discussed on page 17) a change in policy is required to ensure fair compensation for legal aid lawyers. It is also key to remove bureaucratic obstacles for legal aid (as in Italy), and to put in place mechanisms to ensure timely payment of fees. b. Mechanisms for early appointment Where a suspect does not have the financial means to afford a lawyer of choice, it is crucial to have a system in place to provide for free legal aid from the beginning of the proceedings. The Access to a Lawyer Directive leaves the mechanism for early appointment up to the individual Member States. • Practical inequalities in the exercise of rights: Significant practical issues exist in countries which provide for ex-officio appointments of legal aid lawyers. In Greece, there is insufficient use of legal aid at the pretrial detention stage and it is far more common that the investigating judge appoints a lawyer ex-officio when the suspect is brought before them to provide their statement during the hearing (which ultimately determines if they are going to be placed in pre-trial detention). This means that, in effect, until the very recent amendments of the Criminal Procedure Code,61 the person was without representation in the police station and that the lawyer did not have an opportunity to consult their client and to prepare for the hearing beforehand. Legal aid appointment systems should be put in place to ensure that a suspect received legal assistance from the earliest moment on. • Implementation of new schemes for the early appointment of lawyers (see Hungary, box, above right) and the practical implementation of recent amendments of the law (as in Greece), should be closely monitored. • Local bar associations should get involved in the transposition of the Legal Aid Directive, particularly in respect to key notions such as ‘adequate quality,’ which require the establishment of objective criteria to enable the effective monitoring of quality of legal aid services. Hungary recently reformed its appointment system,62 making the appointment of a legal aid lawyer the responsibility of the local bar associations. The selection is now done via an IT system which the national bar association operates, and which randomly selects a lawyer from the list of lawyers through a secured internet site who must then be notified by the authorities and are equally notified by the bar association about the appointment. Bar associations also have an obligation to maintain an on-call list of lawyers who can be appointed outside of working hours (however, this on-call list is still missing in certain areas of the country, including the capital). If there are not enough volunteers on the on-call list of lawyers, the county bar association obliges lawyers in the county to take part in the appointment system. The main purpose of the new system of appointing legal aid lawyers was to ensure that defendants receive more effective protection in criminal proceedings.63 The new system ensures a ‘rotation’ of lawyers and helps avoid the practice of certain authorities to repeatedly choose the same lawyer. of their (publicly available) cell phone number. In Greece, communication over the phone was identified as a practical challenge for suspects. Suspects are required to initiate the contact, but no access is provided to a phone or the suspect is unable to cover the cost of phone cards. In Bulgaria, very often the selection of legal aid lawyers is not made by the bar association, as required by the law, but by the investigating authorities themselves. Circumventing the statutory procedure, the investigative authorities were only choosing lawyers who they knew would cooperate with the prosecution. • The proper implementation of EU norms in respect to early appointment of a lawyer during the context of police custody must be monitored. In particular, the Commission should offer technical support to Member States to set up an early appointment mechanism. • Suspects and accused persons must be provided with access to a list of lawyers on duty and a telephone to enable them to contact a lawyer of their choice and it must be ensured that this access is free of charge. • Adequate guidance must be in place in all police stations specifying what policer officers are required to do to ensure that a lawyer can be appointed and is able to communicate with their client. • Dysfunctional early appointment mechanisms: Practical challenges were highlighted in a number of countries. In Italy, instances were cited of lawyers being called outside office hours on their office landline instead 61 On 11 June 2019, the Government Gazette published the new Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code, laws 4619 and 4620. The new laws apply for all criminal court proceedings beginning as of 1 July 2019. Act XC of 2017 on the Code of Criminal Procedure, in force since 1 July 2018. In this context, Fair Trials submitted a third-party intervention before the European Court of Human Rights in the case Application No 62676/11 Magyar Helsinki Bizottság v Hungary (No 2), see https://www.fairtrials.org/wp-content/uploads/HHC-v-Hungary.pdf. 62 63 18 Good practice: Hungary