Call: Action grants to support projects to enhance the rights of persons suspected or accused of crime

The general objective of the Programme shall be to contribute to the further development of a European area of justice based on mutual recognition and mutual trust, in particular by promoting judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters. The Programme focuses on the following Specific Objectives:

• to facilitate and support judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters
• to support and promote judicial training, including language training on legal terminology, with a view to fostering a common legal and judicial culture
• to facilitate effective access to justice for all, including to promote and support the rights of victims of crime, while respecting the rights of the defence
• to support initiatives in the field of drugs policy as regards judicial cooperation and crime prevention aspects closely linked to the general objective of the Programme

This call for proposals will cover the following activities:

• capacity building for professionals;
• mutual learning, exchange of good practices, development of working methods which may be transferable to other participating countries;
• exchange and provision of information and development of information tools;
•  facilitating cooperation between competent authorities and agencies, legal practitioners and/or service providers (including multi-disciplinary networks at international, national, regional or local levels);
• dissemination and awareness raising activities;
• analytical activities, such as data collection and creation of data bases, surveys, research etc.

Projects ensuring maximum practical benefits and impacts for the target groups will be more favourably assessed than projects consisting mainly of research and other analytical activities. Moreover, projects providing for conformity assessments of transposition of the above instruments into national law are not a priority of this call.
Training activities can also be funded under this call, as long as they are of ancillary nature and not the main purpose of the project.

Applicants and partners must comply with the following requirements:

• Legal status: Applicants and partners must be legally constituted public or private organisations, or international organisations. Bodies set up by the European Union falling under Article 208 of the Financial Regulations (EU bodies and institutions) are not eligible for funding and cannot submit applications. They can be associated to an application, but their costs will not be co-financed. Only legally constituted organisations can participate. Natural persons (private individuals) are not allowed to submit applications.
• Bodies and organisations which are profit-oriented can apply, be it as applicant or as partner, only in partnership with private non-profit or public organisations.

‘Non-profit organisation’ can be

1. a legal entity that is by its legal form non-profit-making; or
2. has a legal or statutory obligation not to distribute profits to its shareholders or individual members. The provision that profits will not be distributed must be clearly stipulated either in the law or in the statutes of the organisation; decisions on (not) distributing profits made by its managing board, associates, stakeholders, members or representatives are not sufficient proof of the non-profit nature.

The indicative available budget under this call for proposals is 2 000 000 €.

The EU grant requested cannot be lower than 75 000 €.

The grant cannot constitute more than 80% of overall eligible project costs.

BOVING Philippe
Philippe.BOVING@ec.europa.eu

BEDNARZ Barbara
Programme Assistant - EU policies
Barbara.BEDNARZ@ec.europa.eu