This book is the second of two volumes published in the context of the research project 'Protecting Young Suspects in Interrogations'. This EU-funded research project sprung from the observation that knowledge of the existing level of procedural protection offered to juvenile suspects during interrogation is limited. The research project aimed to fill at least part of this gap by shedding more light on the existing procedural rights for juveniles during interrogations in five EU Member States with different systems of juvenile justice (Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands). In doing so, it intended to identify legal and empirical patterns to improve the effective protection of the juvenile suspect. The project has been a joint effort of Maastricht University, Warwick University, Antwerp University, Jagiellonian University and Macerata University in cooperation with Defence for Children and PLOT Limburg. The results of the first part of the project a legal and comparative study into existing legal procedural safeguards for juvenile suspects during interrogation in the five selected Member States have been published in a separate volume (M. Panzavolta, D. de Vocht, M. van Oosterhout and M. Vanderhallen, Interrogating Young Suspects: Procedural Safeguards from a Legal Perspective, Cambridge: Intersentia 2015). This second volume reflects the results of the second and third part of the research project. First, it contains the results of the empirical research conducted in the five Member States consisting of focus group interviews and observations of recorded interrogations. The empirical findings of each Member State are discussed in separate chapters to provide an in-depth account of perceptions and practices in the context of each jurisdiction. Second, the country reports are followed by an integrated analysis resulting from the merging of the legal and empirical findings offering a comparative overview and combining the national findings into an integrated perspective. Finally, the book contains a set of guidelines a framework of minimum rules developed on the basis of the research projects findings. The guidelines and their additional explanatory remarks include recommendations for good practices and are intended to serve as an inspiration for promoting good practice in the context of juvenile suspect interrogations throughout the EU.The book is intended for practitioners, academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the area of juvenile justice and interrogation.
About the Author: Miet Vanderhallen holds a degree in criminology and a PhD from KU Leuven. Since 2008 Miet has been appointed as assistant professor at Maastricht University, dept. Criminal law and Criminology, teaching in various criminological courses. Besides, she is appointed as a professor at Antwerp University, faculty of Law, where she teaches psychology and law courses. Marc van Oosterhout holds two degrees in law (criminal law and forensics) from Maastricht University (the Netherlands). His main research interests are in the fields of (European) criminal procedure and fundamental (suspects') rights, police proceedings and interrogation. During the course of this research project, he was a researcher at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Maastricht University. Before that he had been appointed as a researcher and tutor at the same institution. Earlier he was involved in another European project studying rights of suspects in police detention during which he conducted fieldwork in the Netherlands and Scotland. Besides empirical research, he was involved in the daily operational tasks that are required in large-scale research projects. Due to his research and operational skills, Marc has conducted legal and empirical research in the Netherlands and Belgium and is part of the project management team. He has also been responsible for social media (project website, LinkedIn and Twitter account) during the project. At present, he is a project manager at AMBER Alert Netherlands where he is responsible for further local embedding of AMBER Alert, organizing and analysing an EU regional police cooperation pilot and various other projects.Michele Panzavolta is Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and part-time Assistant Professor at the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands), where he was a Marie-Curie Fellow for a research on intelligence. He graduated from the University of Bologna (Italy) and obtained his doctorate at the University of Urbino (Italy). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bologna and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is a qualified attorney at the Bar of Bologna and has experience as a practicing criminal lawyer in Italy. He specialises in European and international criminal law and in comparative studies on criminal law and procedure. Besides juvenile criminal justice, his research interests are in intelligence-related topics (surveillance, intelligence analysis, relationship between police and judicial bodies and intelligence services, cybercrime, et cetera), financial crime and asset recovery and, more generally, the protection of individual rights in criminal matters.