The Protection of Human Rights through Criminal Justice: the Right to Effective Criminal Investigations in Europe. An Integrate Analysis between the ECHR and EU Law

The subject matter of this research are the States’ obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR) to protect human rights through criminal law, with a focus on the procedural limb of such protection, namely the States’ duty to carry out effective criminal investigations into the most serious human rights offences. Furthermore, this study adopts also an integrated approach and discusses the interplay between the duty to conduct effective criminal investigations under the ECHR and the EU legal framework, by analysing the most relevant EU instruments of judicial cooperation in criminal matters in view of assessing whether it actually implements the instances of effectiveness of criminal proceedings into human rights offences flowing from the ECHR and whether it offers a stronger protection of such rights.