RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Testimonial evidence in a European area of freedom, security and justice: mutual recognition and harmonization scenarios

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi del PIEMONTE ORIENTALE "Amedeo Avogadro"-Vercelli - SCIENZE GIURIDICHE ED ECONOMICHE - VERCELLI(VC)

Research Unit Leader

Marta BARGIS

Description

As the outline of the principal set of rules with respect to the admissibility of evidence depicts one of the most questionable topic in the European Union we shall examine the final distinctive character of testimonial evidence, its nature and its ground in the International Conventions on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters between Member States.
We intend clearly to pick out how to protect the victims' rights, the accused's rights and the other person' rights among the Member States concerned in cooperation, having the intention to avoid superimpositions and blanks due to the self-evident heterogeneousness of the national criminal procedure law.
We shall keep particular care to the hearing, by videoconference or by telephone conference, of the witness or the expert if this one is abroad or, anyhow, when it is necessary to make special arrangements to cater for certain vulnerable categories of victim. In this same perspective, we promise ourselves to analyse thoroughly the 2000 Convention, one of the highlights of which concerns the introduction of hearing by videoconference in an European scale. At last, it is a firm goal of the Network Group of the Oriental Piedmont to weigh the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in subject matter in comparison with the "abstract" Italian constitutional provisions, first and foremost in their relationship with the ordinary set of rules.
The final result of the project turns to the perspective of harmonization and European judicial cooperation with a particular eye to the testimonial evidence when the examined person is vulnerable and/or abroad; nevertheless, we are compelled to leave out the distinctive features of organised crime because this topic is assigned to an other Network (in detail the Network Group of Pavia).
We shall devote a worthy attention tot the project known as "Corpus Juris 2000" that was drafted by an expert Network Group of the Member States. It is infused with the "new" principles of "European territoriality" and of "proceedings which are contradictoire" and consists of a set of criminal law rules and of a set of criminal procedure rules for the protection of financial interests of the European Union; it provides for 1) an European Public Prosecutor (EPP), responsible for the conduct of investigations and for presenting the prosecution case before the national trial judges with regard to specific laid down offences against the budgetary interests of the Union and for 2) a set of rules, applicable to every critical stages of the criminal process, that are related to the accused's rights and the law of evidence (rules that, in part, go on with the contents of the 1951 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights). In particular, we shall test the rules concerning the European deposition/interrogation report to draw, in a tentative way, the lines and the conditions for the implementation of the principle of mutual recognition in the law of evidence as well.