Emerging and disruptive technological innovations are challenging established legislative and regulatory frameworks creating tensions, legal uncertainty, legal codification race and high costs for countering cybercrime, cyber-security and privacy protection. Cyberspace must transform from a crime scene in an area of justice.

The crucial issue confronting justice in cyberspace is the conflict between the legal principle of territoriality and the borderless nature of Internet and Internet based applications and technologies. Technological evolutions and the global ‘digitalisation’ constitute a tremendous challenge for law enforcement and judicial authorities as they need to access evidence located on servers or IT and Cloud systems that are often based abroad. Such evidence can be linked to any type of offence, be it terrorism and its financing, fraud and financial offences, money laundering, murders, aggressions and violent crimes, human trafficking, drug trafficking, child pornography and other forms of child abuse.

The seminar will analyse these challenges at the level of the EU examining the evolutions of the e-evidence legislative model proposed by EU in April 2018: draft Regulation on European Production and Preservation Orders for electronic evidence in criminal matters and the Proposal for a Directive on the appointment of legal representatives for the purpose of gathering evidence in criminal proceedings.

The future EU legal model will be examined in the context of current international developments on e-evidence and, in particular, the impact of the US CLOUD Act adopted in March 2018 and with regards to the second protocol to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime currently being discussed at the Council of Europe

Who is this course for:

The seminar is geared towards officials of the EU institutions and agencies that deal with issues relating justice and law enforcement; officials from national public institutions and judicial authorities; lawyers, officials of international organisations.

Course methodology/ highlights:

The methodology will consist of a combination of presentations, discussions, practical examples and case studies, so that participants can derive as much as possible from the complementary practical experience of the facilitators.

The course will be interactive and practice-based. It will benefit form the contribution of justice practitioners possessing high level expertise on judicial cooperation and digital evidence.