Toolkits integrating tools and techniques for forensic laboratories

The most promising forensic techniques need to be developed further, and brought up from experiment to a toolkit usable on a daily basis across Europe. This can be achieved if forensic laboratories from a broad variety of EU countries with diverse legal systems agree on common technical standards and join forces along the following steps:

Phase 0: To prepare an inventory of forensic technologies already available at TRL 4 or 5, and to identify, within all areas covered by the various ENFSI working groups (http://www.enfsi.eu/), a subset of technologies to be brought at TRL 8;

Phase 1: To prepare the tenders packages for calls for tenders to build prototypes of a toolkit integrating the above-mentioned subset of technologies, that can be used across Europe; To develop EU-wide benchmarks and validation methods for forensic technologies;

Phase 2: To implement the calls for tenders to generate 2 prototype toolkits from 2 different sources;

Phase 3: To benchmark and validate the 2 toolkits against the methods developed during Phase 1;

Phase 4: To draft a curriculum for pan European training in forensic technologies, and to plan for its assessment across Europe; to initiate the EU-wide certification of the toolkits based on the results of Phase 3.

For grants awarded under this topic SEC-09-FCT-2017, beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional obligations aiming to ensure exploitation of its results:

To ensure that the outcome of the PCP action becomes also available to EU Member State national authorities as well as EU agencies not participating in the PCP for further procurement purposes, the proposal must necessarily state:

(1). Agreement from participating procurement authorities to negotiate, in good faith and on a case-by-case basis, with non-participating procurement authorities that wish to procure a capability or a product fully or partly derived from the PCP action, the use of the information required to run such a procurement process, and solely for that purpose.

(2). Commitment from participating procurement authorities to consult with any legal entity generating information to be released for the purpose set out in paragraph (1), unless contrary to applicable legislation.

(3). Commitment from participating procurement authorities to negotiate the use granted under paragraph (1) on Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

The respective option on additional exploitation obligations of Article 28.1 of the Model Grant Agreement will be applied.

The outcome of the proposal is expected to lead to development up to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 8; please see part G of the General Annexes.

Indicative budget: The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of € 10million would allow for this topic to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Since 2011 the EU has developed a vision about European Forensic Science 2020 including the creation of a European Forensic Science Area and the development of forensic science infrastructure in Europe.[[http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/jha/126875.pdf]]

A wide, heterogeneous, variety of forensic tools are in use or being developed across Europe, making the comparison and exchange of information among forensic laboratories difficult and sometimes impossible, which limits the use of forensic data in cross-border investigations, and in foreign courts. Forensic data need to be quickly available, at an acceptable cost, across borders.

Medium term:

• Advanced forensic toolkits usable across the EU an providing comparable results admissible in court;

Long term:

• Path towards an EU-wide certification mechanism based on common standards.