Digitalization of cross-border cooperation in criminal matters in the European Union

It is assumed that the use of information technologies in the judicial system could contribute not only to increasing the efficiency of the work of competent authorities and streamlining criminal proceedings and individual procedural actions, but it might have such an impact on cross-border judicial cooperation procedures between competent authorities of different countries, as well. At the level of the European Union, there has been a strategic commitment to creating European e-Justice in the last fifteen years, and the concept of cooperative digital justice has also been developing recently. The concept was given a legal basis in 2023 with the adoption of the Regulation on the digitalisation of judicial cooperation and access to justice in cross-border civil, commercial and criminal matters. This paper presents an overview of the emergence and development of the ideas that led to the Regulation, and analyses of the legal framework, with an emphasis on cooperation in criminal matters. The paper also pays attention to a special form of cross-border cooperation in criminal matters, namely participation in court proceedings via video-conferencing or other distance communication technologies, when individual participants in the proceedings are located in the territory of different member states, which represent a certain modification of criminal proceedings in the context of the increasing use of information technologies.