New paper by Wojciech Jasiński

We’re proud to share the latest paper by Wojciech Jasiński, titled: “Search and seizure and the European Court of Human Rights: Ensuring effective protection at the domestic level”, published in New Journal of European Criminal Law (Volume 16, Issue 4, pp. 474–498).

The article discusses the approach of the ECtHR to searches and seizures in criminal cases. The aim is to assess whether the Court’s case law can influence lawmakers and authorities applying the law at the domestic level in providing effective protection of the rights of individuals.

Wojciech claims that the holistic and case-by-case approach developed by the ECtHR has very little potential to influence domestic legal systems, even in general terms. The main reason for this is that the Court does not provide clear guidance to national stakeholders on how legal texts and practices should be shaped. Furthermore, despite the new digital reality influencing searches, the ECtHR has made little, if any, departure from its established practice of adopting a broad, contextual assessment of interferences with the right to privacy. In this context, the burden of protecting the rights of the individual falls primarily on the domestic authorities responsible for overseeing searches.