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EJTN has announced the new advanced seminar "The European Investigation Order in Practice",  which will be held on 21 and 22 October 2021 in Riga, Latvia. The aim of the educational seminar is: - to provide a better understanding of the current landscape of EU cross- border gathering of evidence (Mutual Legal Assistance and Mutual Recognition) and the perspectives and challenges offered by the Directive on the European Investigation Order; - to advise on what relates those main changes with the EIO Directive in order to raise awareness among practitioners on practical questions that may arise regarding rights and obligations of [...]

The Public Prosecutor Gaetano Bono, leading the investigation into the death of 43-year-old Stefano Paternó, a Navy petty officer in service at the base of Augusta (Syracuse), who died on 9th March last year at his home in Misterbianco (Catania, Sicily) fifteen hours after receiving his first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, is seeking a complete overview to ascertain what happened to Mr Paternó. The outcome of his investigation could also shed light on other investigations (currently about ten) opened throughout Italy into suspicious deaths related to receiving the first dose of the vaccine. It was the same Prosecutor who issued [...]

The Italian Court of Cassation, in a series of very interesting decisions, has censured some decisions pronounced by the Italian judicial authorities which had devalued the role of the European Investigation Order (EIO), instead recognising the validity of the instrument. In an initial decision - no. 8320 of 31 January 2019 - the Sixth Chamber of the Italian Court of Cassation had criticised the delayed communication to the defence of the decree recognising an EIO issued by Germany in tax evasion proceedings[1]. According to the Italian High Court, this should be seen as a clear breach of Article 4(4) of Italian [...]

Art 11 para 1 point f EIO Directive explicitly formulates a ground for refusal of the recognition or execution of an incoming EIO due to a fundamental rights violation. This is a novelty compared to other European instruments of cross-border judicial cooperation. Accordingly, the executing state may refuse the recognition or execution of an EIO if it would violate Art 6 TEU or the CFR. This ground for refusal was adopted almost verbatim in the Austrian implementation law (§ 55a para 1 pint 7 EU-JZG). The fundamental rights refusal ground is to be used restrictively in the system of mutual recognition [...]

In a previous contribution to this blog Jan Stajnko and Mário Simões Barata commented the CJEU´s first ruling on the European Investigation Order (EIO) in Case C-324/17, Gavazonov, 24th October 2019, and pointed out to the fundamental rights objections in the Opinion of the Advocate General Yves Bot of 11 April 2019 and the criticisms expressed by legal scholars. The CJUE ruled that the national issuing authority does not have to include a description of the legal remedies available in the issuing State to challenge an EIO when it fills out Section J of the form that can be found in [...]

On 8th December 2020, the European Court of Justice ruled that public prosecutors' offices can still be judicial or issuing authorities within the meaning of Articles 1(1) and 2(c) of the Directive regarding the European Investigation Order in criminal matters (EIO), ‘regardless of any relationship of legal subordination that might exist between the public prosecutor or public prosecutor’s office and the executive of that Member State and of the exposure of that public prosecutor or public prosecutor’s office to the risk of being directly or indirectly subject to orders or individual instructions from the executive when adopting a European investigation order’ [...]

We would like to invite all interested parties to attend the FREE online conference “European Investigation Order – Practical Dilemmas and Theoretical Considerations”. Prosecutors, judges, attorneys and academics from multiple EU Member States will share best practices and identify key shortcomings of the European Investigation Order. Presentations will be held by invited speakers from Germany, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Portugal and Macedonia. Facebook event is available HERE.  Online registration and finalized schedule of the conference and will be available soon! We can however already provide a sneak peek into the preliminary conference schedule (may be subject to some minor [...]

Earlier this week, an article regarding the cross-border gathering of electronic evidence under the EIO-Directive was published in the University of Graz Law School’s Paper – Law@Graz. The idea behind publishing an article written by a student in a paper for students was to present the EIO-LAPD project to them, as well as interest them in this rather complex topic by writing about something that appeals to younger generations, namely the electronic evidence. The article tried to shed some light on the relevance of the EIO-Directive mirrored in substantive changes in the horizontal model of judicial cooperation it established, especially when [...]

In its judgement in joined cases C-508/18 (Parquet de Lübeck) and C‑82/19 PPU (Parquet de Zwickau) which was delivered on 27 May 2019, the European Court of Justice found that the German Public Prosecutor does not qualify as an “issuing judicial authority” within the meaning of Art. 6(1) of the Framework Decision on the European Arrest Warrant. Art. 6(1) of the Framework Decision defines the meaning of the term “issuing judicial authority” thereby determining which national authority may be considered competent to issue a EAW. Therefore, the Court concluded that the German Public Prosecutor may not be considered such an authority [...]

In Case C‑584/19, the Advocate General delivered his opinion (Opinion of Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona, 16 July 2020, C-584/19, Celex-No. 62019CC0584). At the heart of the case lies an EIO issued by the Public Prosecutor's Office in Hamburg, which requested the transfer of certain data from an account held in Austria. As the obtaining of such information under Austrian law requires a court authorization, the Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office filed an application with the Landesgericht für Strafsachen Vienna (Austria). In view of the ECJ decision on the status of the German Public Prosecutor's Offices in the context of the European Arrest [...]