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Published July 18, 2022 | Version v1
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Mutual trust to obtain electronic evidence in the EU: is the bar low or high?

Description

The European Union is in urgent need of a specific, streamlined mechanism for the preservation and production procedures for electronic data stored by service providers. This is needed in order to accelerate the cross-border obtainment of such data and relieve the pressure on the mutual assistance system used in relations with non-EU states. Hence, in 2018, the European Union launched a proposal for electronic evidence gathering which introduced rules to facilitate cross-border access to four categories of data: subscriber data, access data, transactional data and stored content data, directly from the service providers in other jurisdictions. The proposed scenario of cooperation redefines the role that mutual trust plays in cross border evidence-gathering. Therefore, the aim of this research paper is to verify whether the European Union can afford this new model of cooperation in a tentative environment of mutual trust.

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References

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