High ranking professionals from both the police and justice sector participated in a round-table to find pragmatic solutions for better cooperation between police and justice bodies. They were discussing the improving of common understanding of certain legal definitions and increasing the trust and communication among different law enforcement agencies involved in the process of crime scene investigation.
The EU funded project „EU Support to Law Enforcement“, in cooperation with the Swiss-financed project “Strengthening the Capacity of Prosecutors in the Criminal Justice System” managed by the BiH High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC) and the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), organised the discussion.
The participants set out to define evidence standards for “grounds of suspicion” as a degree of plausibility of committed criminal offences, to determine starting points of prosecutor‘s supervision over the work of authorised officials during the criminal investigations, as well as to jointly define the goals of investigation and the best possible way to secure evidence for prosecuting criminal offences.
The round-table also reviewed the proposed draft of the “Instruction on conduct and cooperation of authorized official persons and prosecutors in actions of obtaining evidence in the course of investigation”, which was prepared by the HJPC. The project, HJPC and ICITAP analyzed the related training needs and agreed to develop and organize the training modules jointly, with a shared goal of providing police and justice with the tools for bringing criminal procedures to a successful close.
The project funded by the EU in the amount of 7 million euro, from the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA 2010), will continue until 30 April 2014. The project consortium partners include the Ministries of Interior of the Republic of Austria, Republic of Slovenia, Hungary and of the Land Brandenburg of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and Transparency International BiH (as an Associate). Beneficiary partners are BiH law enforcement agencies at state, entity, cantonal and Brčko District level.
