Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Crown Prosecutors' Offices

Information and communication technology (ICT) are playing an important role in the criminal justice chain, but very little is known about public prosecutor's offices, while there is a strong need to exchange information among practitioners, decision makers, and scholars in order to share experiences, knowledge, and facilitate the adoption of common ICT solutions and practices in a cost-effective way.

This Research Project stresses the need to pursue judicial cooperation in the area of criminal law, and it contributes to fostering mutual knowledge of European legal and judicial systems as well as best practices and technological solutions. The Project is not limited to legal literature, but it has an inter-disciplinary approach, and it focuses on practical experiences and policies implemented. The project will lead to a conference to disseminate the information collected, to pass on knowledge of immediate use in carrying on professional activities, as well as to increase the number of practitioners, academics, and policy makers who will take advantage of and profit from the research. The research entails six in-depth case studies. Four of them will be carried on by the organizations' partners in this research: England and Wales, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, two others are in the process to be identified.

After a description of the governance system of public prosecution in the countries considered in this study, since ICT application are not developed in a vacuum, the research will describe, study, and compare through an in-depth analysis: (1) the use of ICT in case investigations, (2) the use of ICT for case management, (3) the ICT interoperability between public prosecutor's offices, courts, police and prisons, and (4) the use of ICT for sharing prosecutorial information between countries.

The research will allow to: (a) detect the valuable and successful implementations of ICT in criminal investigations (e.g. decision support systems, access to data bases, multimedia applications), (b) disseminate technical information about these applications, (c) explore the feasibility for cross-border exchange of data such as criminal history records and illegal immigration records, (d) develop a network of scholars and practitioners about ICT for public prosecutor's offices.

This report structure, should serve as a guide to the researchers working on the various countries. It is divided into three main sections. Section 1 will deal with the institutional setting of public prosecutor. Section 2 will deal with ICT history, governance and infrastructures. Section 3 will deal with technologies for investigation and prosecution of crimes.