The DigiRights Project

OUR RESEARCH CONSORTIUM
DIGIRIGHTS represents a consortium of seven partners: KU Leuven (Belgium), Tartu Ülikool (Estonia), Magyar Helsinki Bizottság (Hungary), Universität Göttingen (Germany), Università degli Studi di Genova (Italy), Sveučilišta u Zagrebu (Croatia), Université du Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
The consortium reunites jurisdictions that are representative of four different geographical areas of Europe: North, East, West and South. They have been chosen to reflect not only different souls of the EU, but also different criminal procedural traditions.
THE TEAM
KU Leuven

Principal Investigator
Prof. Michele Panzavolta
Michele Panzavolta is Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven. He 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. His research interests are in intelligence-related topics, financial crime and asset recovery, digital evidence and, more generally, the protection of individual rights in criminal matters.

Researcher
Dr. Anna Mosna
Anna Mosna is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven. She holds a PhD from the University of Luxembourg, where she defended a doctoral thesis on ‘Art Laundering’, focusing on cultural property crime and laundering phenomena within the art market. Her research interests further lie in topics of judicial cooperation in criminal matters, including cross-border evidence gathering and defence rights protection.

Junior Researcher
Ashlee Beazley
Ashlee Beazley is a PhD candidate at LINC, KU Leuven. Her research centres around the quality of defence lawyers in England and Wales, and Belgium, and whether it is possible to determine what poor-quality defence representation amounts to. Alongside her PhD research, Ashlee is also a teaching assistant and has contributed as a researcher to a number of inter-jurisdictional research projects, including EmpRiSe, a European Commission-funded study on the right to silence during criminal investigations. Originally from New Zealand, Ashlee also holds conjoint BA (History) and LLB (Hons.) degrees from the University of Auckland (2015), and a MSt in British and European History from the University of Oxford (2016).
Tartu University

Team Leader Estonia
Prof. Jaan Ginter
Jaan Ginter is a Professor of Criminology at the School of Law of the University of Tartu. He is serving as the European Criminal Law Academic Network Contact Point for Estonia. His research and writing encompass criminology, judicial system, ethics, criminal law and procedure (including international and European criminal law and procedure). Author of 11 monographs, 19 articles published in the journals indexed or abstracted in international databases or in the collections of articles published by international science publishing houses, 20 other academic papers, 5 conference abstracts and 8 other publications (textbooks, legal commentaries, etc). Experienced at working in a European and global dimension such as being a rapporteur for Latvia and Malta at the Council of Europe GRECO workgroup, member of different workgroups focusing on the cooperation in criminal matters between the EU Member States and assessing transposition of multiple EU Directives into the Estonian law.
Hungarian Helsinki Committee

Team Leader Hungary
Dr. András Kadar
András Kristóf Kádár is a lawyer, has been working for the Hungarian Helsinki Committee since 1998 and has been its co-chair since 2007. He has extensive experience in human rights monitoring of law enforcement agencies, criminal procedural rights, equal treatment, and the rule of law. András Kádár has conducted research on prison conditions in Hungary and has authored several studies on the subject. He was the leader of the project experiment on the reform of the public defender system. As a lawyer, he is actively involved in a wide variety of proceedings, winning several high-profile cases before the European Court of Human Rights. He is the author of numerous studies and co-author of several publications on criminal policy, the prison system, policing, access to justice, the defence system, equal treatment and the rule of law.

Researcher
Dr. Tünde Komoróczki
Tünde Komoróczki is a lawyer who gained experience in labour law, corporate law and social security law at a law firm, and later in competiton law at the Hungarian Competition Authority. During and after university she has also volunteered with several legal aid organisations. She joined the Justice and Rule of Law Programme at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee in 2022 February, where, as a legal officer, she works to enforce prisoners’ rights and for a more humane criminal justice system.
University of Göttingen

Team Leader Germany
Prof. Kai Ambos
Kai Ambos is Chair for Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Comparative Law, International Criminal Law and Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, Georg-August-University Göttingen. He is also Acting Director at the Institute for Criminal Law and Justice, Director of the Centro de Estudios de Derecho Penal y Procesal Penal Latinoamericano (CEDPAL), Judge Kosovo at the Specialist Chambers of The Hague, Netherlands, and Advisor (amicus curiae) of the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace.

Researcher
Prof. Peter Rackow
Peter Rackow is an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Georg-August-University Göttingen since 2018. After his Habilitation in Göttingen in 2007, he taught at the German Police University in Münster-Hiltrup and subsequently worked as a lawyer specialising in traffic law.
He is also a long-standing member of the Lower Saxony State Office for Legal Examinations. His main areas of interest are national criminal law in the area of offences against public order and European criminal law as well as mutual legal assistance.

Junior Researcher
Lena Ertle
Lena Ertle is a Junior Researcher in the DigiRights project at the University of Göttingen. She completed her studies at the University of Konstanz with the First Legal State Examination and a focus on criminal law. She then completed her legal clerkship, which she concluded with the Second Legal State Examination. During her legal clerkship she worked at the Public Prosecutor's Office and in an EU project (Strengthening procedural rights in police custody: ProRPC) at the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Fundamental and Human Rights in Vienna.