Article 6 § 1 requires that, as a rule, access to a lawyer should be provided as from the first interrogation of a suspect by the police (…) The rights of the defence will in principle be irretrievably prejudiced when incriminating statements made during police interrogation without access to a lawyer are used for a conviction.15 We will return to this principle below in Part I. At this point it is useful to bear in mind this summary of key points arising from the above in terms of the approach to Article 6 violations at the ECtHR: - The ECtHR’s own role under Article 6 is to assess the fairness of the proceedings as a whole. Article 6(3) requirements, and the right to silence, are relevant before the trial stage. However, in order to establish a violation of Article 6, it must be demonstrated that the defence rights issue arising at the pre-trial stage prejudiced the overall fairness of proceedings. In the case of the right of access to a lawyer, a violation of Article 6 in principle takes place where (a) access to a lawyer is not provided as from the first interrogation and (b) incriminating statements obtained in absence of a lawyer are used for a conviction. A review of the impact of this case-law at the national level is beyond the scope of this Toolkit. Suffice it to say that, from 2010-2015, there have been major decisions of Supreme / Cassation Courts of France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands among others which have led to significant, often panicked reforms of police custody systems.16 Against this backdrop, it is clear why a Directive was needed to fix common minimum standards in this crucial area. C. THE DIRECTIVE AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION This Toolkit is published in Spring 2016, some months before the deadline for transposition of the Directive on 27 November 2016. Based on the experience to date with the other Roadmap Directives, legislative implementation could take some time in some places, and is likely to extend well into 2017 at least. Accordingly, this Toolkit does not follow the model of the Toolkits on the Interpretation & Translation Directive and Right to Information Directive in proposing preparatory work to examine national transposition of the Directive. Part IV insteadcontains a check-list for implementation of the Directive and indications of the support available from LEAP to achieve this. Parts I-III below are aimed at practitioners using the Directive following its implementation deadline. 15 Salduz v. Turkey, cited above note 7, paragraph 55. See, in this regard, D. Giannoulopoulos [LEAP member] ‘Strasbourg Jurisprudence, Law Reform and Comparative Law: A Tale of the Right to Custodial Legal Assistance in Five Countries’, Human Rights Law Review 16 (2016) 1, available at: http://hrlr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/01/27/hrlr.ngv039. 16 9