Fair Trials publishes the 2025- 2026 LEAP Annual Report

The 2025- 2026 LEAP Annual Report brings together insights from over 200 lawyers, academics, civil society representatives, and people with lived experience of criminal justice systems across Europe. Drawing on national consultations, practitioner discussions at the LEAP Annual Conferences in Milan and Athens, and Fair Trials’ strategic litigation and policy work, the report examines how EU criminal justice standards operate in practice, and where they fall short.

The report covers four interconnected areas:

1. On procedural rights: LEAP members document a persistent gap between legal guarantees and their delivery on the ground, particularly in access to legal assistance during the earliest and most critical stages of detention.
2. On pre-trial detention: Evidence gathered across jurisdictions shows that detention continues to function as a default rather than a last resort, with discriminatory impacts on foreign nationals and other vulnerable groups that existing EU frameworks have failed to address.
3. On judicial cooperation: The report examines the absence of common rules governing cross-border evidence, a structural gap that constrains the defence’s ability to challenge how evidence is obtained and shared, illustrated most starkly by the EncroChat and Sky ECC cases.
4. On extradition and the European Arrest Warrant: Practitioners report a system increasingly used beyond its intended scope, with documented cases of political instrumentalisation and insufficient safeguards for surrender to third countries where fair trial guarantees cannot be assured.

Running through all of this is the work of the European Impacted Persons Advisory Council (EIPAC), whose first full year has brought the voices and expertise of people directly affected by criminalisation into Fair Trials’ research, advocacy, and campaigns, not as subjects, but as co-authors of reform.

Read and download the LEAP Annual Report 2025- 2026.