Last week on the 18th of April, the INNOCENT project held its final event in presence – the project final conference. The event took place in Prague hosted by the partners from CEELI Institute.
Nearly 50 judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and academics gathered for an in-depth discussion on the presumption of innocence as a guarantee for fair trial in the context of the use of electronic evidence.
Sveva Franco from the Criminal Procedural Law Unit in the Directorate general for Justice and Consumers of the European Commission, kicked off the conference outlining the main provisions and purposes of Directive 2016/343 on the strengthening of certain aspects of the presumption of innocence and of the right to be present at the trial in criminal proceedings, drawing attention to its importance. Then, colleagues Benjamin Flander & Martin Jančar from Science and Research Centre Koper (SI) presented one of the main achievements of the project – the Toolkit for handling and admissibility of e- evidence. The agenda continued with intervention on the Budapest Convention, the main international legal instrument for cooperation in criminal matters when it comes to cybercrime, delivered by Jan Kralik from the Cybercrime Division of the Council of Europe. The event also touched upon practical matters in terms of the Croatian experience of e-evidence presented by Andrej Bozhinovski & Aleksandar Marsavelski from the University of Zagreb's Department of Criminal Law After lunch, our colleague Ingrid Borárosová from Bratislava Policy Institute summarised the Policy Briefs coming out of the project experience, followed by Jiri Novak who cast a look into the future with a talk on how AI could interfere with the presumption of innocence and what its role should be in the context of justice. Mr. Novak is the Chair of the IT law committee of the Council of European Bars and Law Societies. The event concluded with a dynamic expert panel moderated by Jan Kolouch from CESNET and featuring the lawyers Julija Kalpokiene (LT), Dr. Oliver Kipper (DE), Dr. Uwe Ewald (DE) and the prosecutor Dr. Bruno Moslavac (HR). They discussed cases and pertinent questions from their practice in terms of how to handle cybercrime cases from a procedural rights perspective.
On behalf of Law and Internet Foundation, Denitsa Kozhuharova opened the event presenting the key achievements of the project. She acted as the master of ceremony for the conference, offering also the concluding remarks and conclusions from all contributions delivered during the event.
The INNOCENT project is still to organise one more webinar, so stay tuned and follow us for further updates:
The INNOCENT project is coordinated by Law and Internet Foundation and is implemented with the support of the Justice Programme of the European Commission under Grant Agreement № 101056685.
