Inside Police Custody 2 EU. No practical deficiencies have been revealed with respect to informing defendants about the reasons for their arrest or detention. On the other hand, in the practice, the requirement set forth in Article 6(1) of Directive 2012/13/EU, according to which information about the criminal act the suspect or the accused person is suspected or accused of having committed “shall be provided promptly and in such detail as is necessary to safeguard the fairness of the proceedings and the effective exercise of the rights of the defence”, is not fully complied with. As far as access to case materials is concerned, the New CCP has brought a fundamental – and, in terms of complying with Article 7 of Directive 2012/13/EU, positive – change: under the New CCP, the defence is, by default, entitled to get access to all the case materials already during the investigation, and the law provides for exceptions to this main rule. In addition, the New CCP focuses on “access”, and regards the handing out of copies only as one of the means of providing access, putting an end to the hegemony of providing “copies”. It is also a positive novelty that it is now prescribed by law and in a wider scope than before that as a rule, records shall be kept of what case materials were accessed by the participants of the criminal procedure and when exactly the access was provided for them. It is also an important improvement that a formal decision shall be delivered about the restriction of the access or the manner of access, and a remedy may be sought against such decisions. The preamble of Directive 2012/13/EU prescribes that case materials shall be provided to the defendant and the defence counsel in “due time”. However, the Old CCP did not set out any deadline as to how long before the hearing on ordering pre-trial detention the prosecutorial motion and the attached case files shall be provided to the defendant and the defence counsel. Research results showed that this legislative shortcoming could result in that the defence did not receive the case files in due time. In order to solve this problem, the New CCP prescribes that access to the case materials shall be provided at a time and in a manner that enables the defence to prepare, but in any case, at least an hour before the hearing starts. In addition, under the new rules investigation judges are authorised to “sanction” by denying the delivery of a decision if for example the defence was not able to access the case materials relied on in the prosecutor’s motion in due time. The changes outlined above facilitate that the right of access to the materials of the case is enforced in the practice in a way that truly contributes to the enforcement of the right to an effective defence. At the same time, we are of the view that as far as the depth of the changes in the practice is concerned, a lot will depend on the practice developed by the judges and courts, as well as on the assertiveness of defence counsels. Access to a lawyer and legal aid According to the regulatory concept of both the Old and the New CCP, having a defence counsel is mandatory in certain cases stipulated (e.g. if the criminal offence the defendant is suspected of is punishable with a sentence of imprisonment of five years or more, the suspect is detained, is a juvenile, etc.). Whether these so-called “mandatory defence” grounds are in place is established by the proceeding authority, and in these cases the defendant may not decide to participate in the procedure without a defence counsel: in these cases, if the defendant does not have an attorney, the authorities appoint one for them. In the Hungarian system, this equals the “merits test” in terms of the Recommendation on legal aid. 71