European Law Enforcement Research Articles

The AI-shift: how Europol is leveraging artificial intelligence to combat serious organised crime and terrorism

Aim: The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement to combat serious organised crime and terrorism, while ensuring responsible and accountable use of AI tools through collaboration and knowledge-sharing among European law enforcement agencies. Methodology: The study uses a descriptive methodology to describe the development and cooperation process through which the Innovation Lab contributes to the innovation development and knowledge sharing of Europol and its member countries. Findings: With the increasing volume and speed of investigative data, AI has emerged as a promising solution to help law enforcement agencies process and analyse large and complex datasets. Europol has been at the forefront of developing and sharing AI tools with its Member States, ensuring their responsible and accountable use. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement investigations has been found to significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of crime fighting, particularly in processing and analysing large and complex datasets. Value: The article highlights the importance of collaboration and knowledge-sharing among law enforcement agencies to keep pace with AI advancements and prevent criminal abuse of these technologies.

Az MI-fordulat: hogyan használja fel az Europol a mesterséges intelligenciát a súlyos szervezett bűnözés és a terrorizmus elleni küzdelemben

Aim: The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement to combat serious organised crime and terrorism, while ensuring responsible and accountable use of AI tools through collaboration and knowledge-sharing among European law enforcement agencies. Methodology: The study uses a descriptive methodology to describe the development and cooperation process through which the Innovation Lab contributes to the innovation development and knowledge sharing of Europol and its member countries. Findings: With the increasing volume and speed of investigative data, AI has emerged as a promising solution to help law enforcement agencies process and analyse large and complex datasets. Europol has been at the forefront of developing and sharing AI tools with its Member States, ensuring their responsible and accountable use. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement investigations has been found to significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of crime fighting, particularly in processing and analysing large and complex datasets. Value: The article highlights the importance of collaboration and knowledge-sharing among law enforcement agencies to keep pace with AI advancements and prevent criminal abuse of these technologies.

Ensuring fundamental rights compliance and trustworthiness of law enforcement AI systems: the ALIGNER Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment

AbstractArtificial intelligence systems can expand the capabilities and enhance the efficiency of law enforcement agencies preventing, investigating, detecting, and prosecuting criminal offences in the European Union. At the same time, the deployment of artificial intelligence in the security domain often raises numerous legal and ethical concerns. The ALIGNER Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment is an operational tool, rooted in fundamental rights and in the principles of AI ethics, ready to be integrated in the AI governance measures of European law enforcement agencies to inform their decision-making processes and ensure compliance with the recently adopted Artificial Intelligence Act. This paper first introduces the main tensions between law enforcement AI and fundamental rights, as enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; then, it gives an overview of the main developments and best practices in AI governance and their relationship with fundamental rights as well as AI ethics; and finally, it describes the structure of the ALIGNER Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment.

Article: Public Compensation for Private Harm: Fair Funds for Consumer Competition Law Redress

This paper discusses the use of the concept of Fair Funds for consumer competition law enforcement from an EU perspective. With such Fair Funds, the US Securities and Exchange Commission distributes collected fines and disgorged profits to compensate victims of securities law violations. The paper explains the use of Fair Funds in US law, highlights similarities, and adapts the concept for use in European competition law enforcement. It places an emphasis on the usefulness of such a concept against the role of consumers, but the conclusions can equally be drawn for small and medium enterprises’ private enforcement or private enforcement of competition law in general. It shows the advantages and disadvantages of including a system of Fair Funds. The paper argues that Fair Funds can serve as an alternative form of compensation, particularly for large groups of individual victims harmed in a small amount, such as consumers, with that overcome the lack of a harmonized collective redress system on EU level, and improve the coordination between public and private enforcement. private enforcement, consumers, collective redress, damages, compensation, fines, disgorgement, US, EU, financial law

A fresh look at judicial remedies in EU equality law and beyond: The untapped possibility of structural injunctions

This article proposes a shift in thinking about judicial remedies (or “sanctions”), from anti-discrimination law to equal pay and beyond.We suggest the currently preferred remedies – one-off declarations, compensation, fines, and simple orders to obey the law – may be insufficient when confronting a recalcitrant institution, complex violations, and broad, ongoing harm. In such cases, we suggest considering a remedy long overlooked in Europe: a “structural injunction”, i.e. ordering changes to an offending organization’s structure, processes, or rules. We argue that under certain circumstances, an injunction, including a structural injunction, may be appropriate or required under EU law to remedy persistent (including “systemic” or “structural”) organizational discrimination. After considering the injunctive demands of Union law, and the appropriateness of structural injunctions, we examine their compatibility with national constitutional traditions. Finally, we analyse different forms of structural injunctions to show how courts may issue them – in what we call their “modern” form – while minding the judiciary’s constitutional role and institutional competence. This article seeks to inform current theory and practice from legislative drafting to enforcement of European equality law, as well as other areas where complex or systemic organizational violations persist. Comparative analysis informs our argument. judicial remedies, EU equality law, structural injunctions

The People: A Serious Role-playing Game Designed to Address a Humanitarian Crisis

In this article, I present a case study of the serious role-play game The People, which was created as a response to the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border in cooperation with an engaged collective of researchers and groups of activists. The game combines elements of role-playing, a board game, and cards to present the complexity of the situation in the Emergency State Zone on the Polish-Belarusian border, especially on the practical, social, and institutional levels. The purpose of the tool is to raise the participants’ awareness of the current situation and to enhance an active search for solutions to the crisis.
 The game enables participants to adopt a perspective of a border zone resident or a refugee, and ultimately modify the rules governing the world to make it fairer. Providing the participants with agency to reconstruct the game environment during the debriefing made it possible to generate numerous possible solutions at the level of direct interventions; e.g., providing shelters in forests, training residents in first aid; legal, e.g., access by doctors and media, allowing humanitarian organizations; and executive, e.g., more effective enforcement of European law. Also, the exposure to goals inconsistent with personal views under significant immersion evokes various strategies to deal with the clash, including passive agreement, rationalization, gentle disagreement, and extreme disagreement. Such a game can inspire a positive change in the level of participants’ understanding, interesting solutions, activist attitudes, and empathy towards asylum seekers. However, the game can also expose the dangerous, existing mechanisms that pose a challenge to society, and what should be monitored and possibly mitigated in the future.

Criminal Law aspects of the institutions of restriction of liberty and probation: compliance with the leading European Law enforcement standards

The article examines the conceptual foundations of interpretation and implementation of probation supervision measures in the general system of criminal punishment in Ukraine, and proves the need to regulate the mechanism of probation supervision at the legislative level as an alternative to restriction of liberty.The author establishes that the problem of creating an effective system of punishment for criminal offenses in Ukraine remains one of the most relevant and important topics of modern legal science. The current criminogenic situation in Ukraine, despite its minor positive trends, remains particularly dangerous for the civilized part of Ukrainian society, and thus negatively affects the internal security of our State. The author determines that it is possible to improve the process of execution of sentences through the introduction of a new type of punishment - probationary supervision.In most countries of the world, the prerequisite for the use of probation supervision was the introduction of restriction of liberty. As a new type of punishment in the post-Soviet space, it first appeared in the Model Criminal Code of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Under the national legislation of Ukraine, restraint of liberty has appeared in the Criminal Code of Ukraine of April 05, 2001. Punishment in the form of restraint of will consists in keeping a person in open-type penal institutions without isolation from society under conditions of supervision with the mandatory involvement of the convict in labor. The term of restriction of freedom is usually one to five years. In the course of the article, it was determined that restraint of liberty is an economically unprofitable type of punishment, because in Ukraine it has equated with deprivation of liberty. In addition, today, many academics and politicians criticize the restriction of free will because it does not help to correct the behavior of criminals. The author of the article determined that probation supervision is the convict’s duty to appear before a special state authority to report a change of residence. The convict must come to the institution at least once every three months.

Novel Speech Recognition Systems Applied to Forensics within Child Exploitation: Wav2vec2.0 vs. Whisper.

The growth in online child exploitation material is a significant challenge for European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). One of the most important sources of such online information corresponds to audio material that needs to be analyzed to find evidence in a timely and practical manner. That is why LEAs require a next-generation AI-powered platform to process audio data from online sources. We propose the use of speech recognition and keyword spotting to transcribe audiovisual data and to detect the presence of keywords related to child abuse. The considered models are based on two of the most accurate neural-based architectures to date: Wav2vec2.0 and Whisper. The systems were tested under an extensive set of scenarios in different languages. Additionally, keeping in mind that obtaining data from LEAs are very sensitive, we explore the use of federated learning to provide more robust systems for the addressed application, while maintaining the privacy of the data from LEAs. The considered models achieved a word error rate between 11% and 25%, depending on the language. In addition, the systems are able to recognize a set of spotted words with true-positive rates between 82% and 98%, depending on the language. Finally, federated learning strategies show that they can maintain and even improve the performance of the systems when compared to centralized trained models. The proposed systems set the basis for an AI-powered platform for automatic analysis of audio in the context of forensic applications of child abuse. The use of federated learning is also promising for the addressed scenario, where data privacy is an important issue to be managed.

О некоторых особенностях регламентации и деятельности следственных групп, формируемых в правоохранительных органах европейских государств

The author examines European states' criminal procedural and departmental laws that regulate the organization and implementation of the activities of investigation teams. He analyzes to the positions of several scientists who have studied the organization of joint investigation teams in the territory of the European Union, reveals the distinctive features of the normative regulation of these teams' activities, investigates the significant differences in organizing investigation teams in European countries from a similar process under Russian criminal procedure laws. The author identifies the positive aspects in the organization and implementation of joint investigation teams' activities and some organizational and procedural shortcomings in the regulation of the activities. The author notes an aspect important at the present stage - the digitalization of criminal proceedings in the activities of the investigative authorities of European states. Separately, he discusses the positive aspects and some problems of organizing investigation teams in Sweden and Finland - European states that are not members of the European Union. The author proposes to consider the introduction of certain activities of investigative teams of European law enforcement agencies in the law enforcement practice of organizing activities of investigative teams of investigative agencies of the Russian Federation in order to increase the efficiency, objectivity, and quality of crime investigation.

Comparing Private Enforcement of EU Competition and Data Protection Law

Abstract Compared to art 82(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which since 2018 grants data subjects a claim for damages resulting from the infringement of European data protection law, private enforcement of European competition law looks back on a much longer history. Thus, its concepts and learnings may serve as a model for data protection law. However, any potential transfer from one area to the other must be carefully weighed, as both the factual circumstances and the underlying regulatory framework differ. Against this background, this paper aims at identifying important similarities and differences between the private enforcement of European competition and data protection law. Amongst others, it reaches the conclusion that both fields of law – although for different reasons – share a comparably high level of Europeanisation and that the primary aims of private enforcement generally align. In addition, potential for spill-over effects from the area of competition to data protection law is identified, namely with regard to causation and the European concept of undertaking.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION – SPRING 2022: DANGEROUS CHANGE OF MOOD

Changes in the current rhetoric of the European Commission (EC) have been revealed by reviewing the content of its press releases and measures taken to respond to the Russian special operation in Ukraine. The author of the article considers these changes dangerous, undermining the ideological foundations of European integration – openness and partnership, as well as standards and norms of the functioning of the Internal Market. An explanation of the current activity of the EC is offered: official Brussels uses the Ukrainian crisis to activate the economic conjuncture, as well as to increase the effectiveness or cover up the miscalculations of its policy in other areas such as green transition, strategic autonomy, global leadership. The EC's attempt to introduce criminal liability through European legislation for circumvention by European companies and countries of anti-Russian sanctions adopted at the EU level was tracked (the corresponding proposal was made on May 25). Two hypotheses have been formulated. First: the EC, whose existential goal is to expand its powers, de facto sees itself not only as a market regulator, but also as an EU power structure, increasingly coordinating the real European law enforcement agencies Europol, Eurojust and Frontex, which seems to be an equally dangerous trend for the future of European integration. Second: activation of the conjuncture and economic growth in the EU are impossible in conditions of a decrease in the resource and market base.

CEPOL’s External Action: Evolution and Outlook

This article aims to present the evolution and further perspectives of the external action by the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL). By analysing the legal background in light of the subsequent mandates of the Agency and against various policy documents, the authors demonstrate the impressive evolution of the past 20 years, both in terms of volume and quality, that has made CEPOL a key player in the European Union’s internal-external security nexus. The Agency has managed to engage nearly all countries in the EU’s proximity on the one hand by concluding cooperation instruments, on the other hand by managing dedicated capacity-building projects. Via all these means, the European law enforcement culture is spread among partner countries’ law enforcement communities. CEPOL is thus actively contributing to the high level of internal security of the European Union, serving its primary customers, i.e. the EU Member States, and well beyond the borders of the Union.

DARLENE - Improving situational awareness of European law enforcement agents through a combination of augmented reality and artificial intelligence solutions.

Background: Augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are highly disruptive technologies that have revolutionised practices in a wide range of domains, including the security sector. Several law enforcement agencies (LEAs) employ AI in their daily operations for forensics and surveillance. AR is also gaining traction in security, particularly with the advent of affordable wearable devices. Equipping police officers with the tools to facilitate an elevated situational awareness (SA) in patrolling and tactical scenarios is expected to improve LEAs' safety and capacity to deliver crucial blows against terrorist and/or criminal threats. Methods: In this paper we present DARLENE, an ecosystem incorporating novel AI techniques for activity recognition and pose estimation tasks, combined with a wearable AR framework for visualization of the inferenced results via dynamic content adaptation according to the wearer's stress level and operational context. The concept has been validated with end-users through co-creation workshops, while the decision-making mechanism for enhancing LEAs' SA has been assessed with experts. Regarding computer vision components, preliminary tests of the instance segmentation method for humans' and objects' detection have been conducted on a subset of videos from the RWF-2000 dataset for violence detection, which have also been used to test a human pose estimation method that has so far exhibited impressive results, constituting the basis of further developments in DARLENE. Results: Evaluation results highlight that target users are positive towards the adoption of the proposed solution in field operations, and that the SA decision-making mechanism produces highly acceptable outcomes. Evaluation of the computer vision components yielded promising results and identified opportunities for improvement. Conclusions: This work provides the context of the DARLENE ecosystem and presents the DARLENE architecture, analyses its individual technologies, and demonstrates preliminary results, which are positive both in terms of technological achievements and user acceptance of the proposed solution.

Police Training in Practice: Organization and Delivery According to European Law Enforcement Agencies.

Police training plays a crucial role in the development of police officers. Because the training of police officers combines various educational components and is governed by organizational guidelines, police training is a complex, multifaceted topic. The current study investigates training at six European law enforcement agencies and aims to identify strengths and challenges of current training organization and practice. We interviewed a total of 16 police instructors and seven police coordinators with conceptual training tasks. A thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Terry et al., 2017) was conducted and results organized in the two main themes evident across all six law enforcement agencies: organization of training and delivery of training. Results show that governmental structures and police executive boards are seen as the primary authorities that define the training framework in which police instructors operate. These administrative structures regulate distant and immediate resources, such as available training time, training facilities, equipment, and personnel. Within the confines of available resources and predetermined training frameworks, results indicate that police instructors thoroughly enjoy teaching, creating supportive and motivating learning environments, and applying their personal learning perspectives to training. Nonetheless, police instructors are critical of the level of training they are able to achieve with the available resources.

Europol and cybercrime: Europol’s sharing decryption platform

ABSTRACT This article examines the resource sharing functionality of the decryption platform of Europol. The platform supports European law enforcement agencies (LEAs) that are having difficulties accessing legally obtained encrypted evidence due to the lack of human and technical resources. The article investigates Europol’s resource transmission role with sharing economy variables such as transaction cost and trust-building. The core argument of the article is that Europol’s sharing platform has a strong potential to reduce the transaction cost of outsourcing the decryption services and diminish trust-related problems for national policing agencies by replacing private sector actors. However, for a more sustainable cybercrime investigation strategy, the decryption platform needs a new market-oriented model supported with robust vetting and evidence security mechanisms to encourage more private company participation.

DARLENE – Improving situational awareness of European law enforcement agents through a combination of augmented reality and artificial intelligence solutions

Background: Augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are highly disruptive technologies that have revolutionised practices in a wide range of domains. Their potential has not gone unnoticed in the security sector with several law enforcement agencies (LEAs) employing AI applications in their daily operations for forensics and surveillance. In this paper, we present the DARLENE ecosystem, which aims to bridge existing gaps in applying AR and AI technologies for rapid tactical decision-making in situ with minimal error margin, thus enhancing LEAs’ efficiency and Situational Awareness (SA). Methods: DARLENE incorporates novel AI techniques for computer vision tasks such as activity recognition and pose estimation, while also building an AR framework for visualization of the inferenced results via dynamic content adaptation according to each individual officer’s stress level and current context. The concept has been validated with end-users through co-creation workshops, while the decision-making mechanism for enhancing LEAs’ SA has been assessed with experts. Regarding computer vision components, preliminary tests of the instance segmentation method for humans’ and objects’ detection have been conducted on a subset of videos from the RWF-2000 dataset for violence detection, which have also been used to test a human pose estimation method that has so far exhibited impressive results and will constitute the basis of further developments in DARLENE. Results: Evaluation results highlight that target users are positive towards the adoption of the proposed solution in field operations, and that the SA decision-making mechanism produces highly acceptable outcomes. Evaluation of the computer vision components yielded promising results and identified opportunities for improvement. Conclusions: This work provides the context of the DARLENE ecosystem and presents the DARLENE architecture, analyses its individual technologies, and demonstrates preliminary results, which are positive both in terms of technological achievements and user acceptance of the proposed solution.

Some aspects of establishing the conformity of an industrial design to the criteria for protection

Keywords: registered industrial designs, novelty, individual character, administrativeprocedure, invalidity
 The new edition of the Law of Ukraine «On the Protection of Rights to Industrial Designs» No. 3770-XII,adopted on October 14, 2020, introduced significant changes to the regulation of thelegal protection of industrial designs. The basic norms of the law were harmonizedwith the articles 212−217 Chapter 9 «Intellectual Property» of the Association Agreementbetween Ukraine, on the one hand, and the European Union, the EuropeanAtomic Energy Community and their Member States, on the other hand. The conceptsof «individual character», «the overall impression», «the informed user» and «thedegree of freedom of the designer», «the circles specializing in the relevant industry»have been introduced into the sphere of legal protection. These concepts were not previouslyused in the legislation of Ukraine. The article analyzes the content of theseconcepts on the basis of European law enforcement practice, Decision of the EuropeanUnion Intellectual Property Office Board of Appeal, Judgment of the Court of Justiceof the European Union и Judgment of the General Court of the European Union. Inaccordance with the new edition of the Law, an industrial design can be declared invalidin an administrative procedure. Authors reviewed the administrative procedure
 for establishing the conformity of a registered industrial design to the criteria for protection(a novelty and an individual character). A registered industrial design shall beconsidered to be new, if no identical design has been previously disclosed to the publicand to have an individual character if the overall impression it produces on the informeduser differs from the overall impression produced on such a user by any previouslydisclosed design. A design shall be deemed to have been made available to thepublic (i) if it has been published following registration or otherwise, or exhibited,used in trade or otherwise disclosed, (ii) except where these events could not reasonablyhave become known in the normal course of business to the circles specializing inthe relevant industry in Ukraine. Authors analyzed this two-step test. Particular attentionwas paid to the disclosure of industrial designs as a trade mark, copyrightwork, patent, utility model or otherwise on the Internet. Criteria for assessing disclosureof designs on the internet considered.

Liability for Violation of Environmental Legislation in the EU

The purpose of this study is to determine the ratio of the legislative mechanisms of administrative and criminal liability for violation of environmental legislation in the legal system of the European Union. Using the methods of political and legal analysis, the comparative legal method and the structure designmethod, the study examines the features of the formation and structure of EU legislative mechanisms in the field of legal regulation of liability for violations of environmental legislation. At the same time, existing problems faced by legislators from the point of view of law enforcement practice in different countries of the European Union are also considered. In the EU, considerable attention is paid to the vector of environmental protection at the supranational level, as well as to the implementation of the acquis communautaire of the environmental legislation into national legislative norms. Nevertheless, the institutions of the European Union have not yet been able to fully achieve complete uniformity with regard to the established environmental liability regime and, accordingly, overcome the difficulties associated with the effective interaction of EU legislation and the realities of national legal systems. At the same time, in European law enforcement practice, administrative measures in matters of environmental responsibility are given preference over measures of criminal responsibility. To date, as evidenced by the study, EU legislators adhere to the position regarding the assignment of criminal prosecution obligations to the national authorities, which is due to the flexibility of law enforcement measures. environmental damage, environmental law, environmental legislation, environmental protection, environmental responsibility, European Union, supranational policy

Voluntary Partnership Agreements: Assessing impacts for better policy decisions

The European Union's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan is an ambitious strategy to fight illegal logging and its negative impacts. The FLEGT theory of change is based on three types of FLEGT actions, namely timber production, demand, and global timber trade standards and dynamics. FLEGT works in more than a dozen countries through Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA). Very few studies exist on the global or country-level impact of the FLEGT-VPA process. We sought to understand the contribution of FLEGT-VPAs in three countries (Cameroon, Ghana, and Indonesia) at different stages of VPA implementation. A uniform methodology was applied to provide cross-cutting results on perceived changes directly linked to the FLEGT expected impacts while allowing for contextual specificities. This approach is designed to be easily replicable in all VPA countries and directly linked to the FLEGT global theory of change. This commentary presents our findings and their implications for policy makers.

European Law Enforcement and US Data Companies: A Decade of Cooperation Free from Law

Online evidence has been indispensable in criminal matters but due to its transnational and volatile nature, there have been issues and challenges as regards access, transfer, and usage in criminal investigations and prosecutions. In recent years, practices have been established to overcome the hurdles of cross-border access to online evidence. One of these practices is direct cooperation between law enforcement authorities and data companies, the latter of which are mostly based in the US. While this cooperation has been less blatant and apparent in its earlier years due to the want of legal basis, law enforcement authorities have been less coy towards the practice more recently. The present contribution walks the reader through the recent developments on codifying the practice of direct cooperation between European law enforcement authorities and US data companies. These developments evince how law enforcement authorities are willingly and wittingly overlooking protective safeguards and issues that ought to be addressed and thoroughly discussed. By sanctioning a relationship of direct cooperation, not only are state interests affected, but likewise issues of trust, MLA rights, privacy and data protection are affected. There ought to be a thorough discussion on these issues and hopefully the lessons learned from the recent CJEU judgments and the German Federal Constitutional Court are taken into consideration.