The Right to Access to a Lawyer at Police Stations: Making the European Union Directive Work in Practice
Recent EU Directives provide for a range of procedural protections for suspects and accused persons, going beyond the more broadly articulated standards set out in the European Convention of Human Rights. These reforms are to be welcomed, but their implementation poses a range of challenges for Member States. Drawing on recent empirical research, this article focuses on one measure, the right to legal assistance during police custody. It discusses the range of complex and often inter-related factors that operate to help or to hinder the process of ensuring that the right is ‘practical and effective’ and not merely ‘theoretical and illusory’. Member States do not share a common procedural tradition and alongside ensuring sufficient financial and human resources, effective implementation will require shifts in the legal and occupational cultures of police, prosecutors and the criminal bar.
Understanding the broader implications of strategic evidence disclosure in police interviews with suspects
Police around the world present evidence to suspects at different points during the interview. Some psychologists suggest that police should strategically delay disclosing evidence and test the truthfulness of a suspect’s account by comparing it with the evidence. Moreover, psychologists suggest interviewers who plan strategic evidence disclosure might be less guilt-presumptive about the suspect because they must consider alternative explanations of the evidence as part of their planning. In contrast, many lawyers argue that police should not strategically disclose evidence as it undermines a suspect’s fair trial rights and prevents lawyers from advising suspects effectively before the interview. 
 
To address these conflicting perspectives from the domains of psychology and law, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach and considers strategic evidence disclosure within the broader legal context of a suspect’s custodial detention. First, a field study of police disclosure briefings with lawyers, lawyer-client consultations, and police interviews, and a survey of lawyers highlights how lawyers rely upon the police’s evidence to advise suspects in custody. When police strategically disclose evidence, lawyers cannot provide informed legal advice and tend to advise suspects to not answer police questions. Second, three experiments and a mini meta-analysis show that generating alternative evidential explanations for criminal cases, as interviewers planning strategic evidence disclosure might do, has a very small effect, or plausibly no effect, on people’s beliefs about the suspect’s guilt. Finally, a mock crime experiment shows that, even two months after a crime, truthful suspects’ accounts fit evidence that was strategically withheld more than deceptive suspects’ accounts did. Independent laypeople from a follow-up experiment could distinguish between these truthful and deceptive accounts. Together, these findings suggest that strategic evidence disclosure could help deception detection even months after a crime, but it also impinges upon suspects’ legal rights and is unlikely to make interviewers less guilt-presumptive.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.