Pompeu Fabra University, through the Constitutional Law area of the Department of Law, is one of the twelve institutions that belonging to the European consortium of the international project titled “ TRIIAL 2: TRust, Independence, Impartiality and Accountability of Legal professionals under the EU Charter”, which aims to provide activities and training tools for judges, lawyers, prosecutors and other legal professionals in important areas for the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

The project, which was officially launched earlier this March at a kick-off meeting held online, is scheduled to run until July 2025. It involves Aida Torres, a senior lecturer with the UPF Department of Law, as its principal investigator, who will be accompanied by other colleagues from the Constitutional Law area.

“At UPF we will develop training materials and case studies for judges, and we will search and select Spanish know-how and jurisprudence in relation to the twelve general topics of the workshops”

One of the main missions of the University within TRIIAL 2 will be to host and organize a transnational training workshop (one of the twelve included in the project) in the various areas linked to the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU: judges and prosecutors from the various member countries and institutions of the consortium will be selected, and it will enjoy the participation of Spanish and European academics and legal operators.

Specifically, the workshop to be organized by UPF is number 5, under the title of “Mutual Trust, Judicial Independence of Prosecutors in the EAW framework”, which refers to the European Arrest Warrant , which is valid in all EU Member States.

In relation to this activity and the project in general, “at UPF we will develop training materials and case studies for judges, and we will search and select Spanish know-how and jurisprudence in relation to the twelve general topics of the workshops, which will be included in a database of the Centre for Judicial Cooperation of the European University Institute of Florence”, explain the principal researcher, Aida Torres, and Joan Solanes, a tenure track professor of the Constitutional Law area and project member.

Content of the TRIIAL 2 workshops

The workshops organized by the other partners focus on issues such as enforcing the rule of law through judicial interaction techniques; rule of law requirements of judicial self-government: the role of judicial councils and court  presidents; mutual trust, judicial independence and judicial cooperation in asylum matters.

Other issues to be addressed will be the freedom of expression and association of judges and prosecutors; the safeguarding of fundamental rights by national higher courts; disciplinary procedure and judicial ethics; the role of lawyers in promoting judicial independence, mutual trust and rule of law; judicial dialogue and the freedom of expression of lawyers; and the rule of law and predictive justice.

A consortium of a dozen prestigious European institutions in the legal field

The consortium, in addition to the Centre for Judicial Cooperation of the European University Institute of Florence (EUI, coordinating centre) and UPF, consists of the Institute of Law and Society (INPRIS, Poland), the Italian School for the Magistracy (SMM), the Lisbon Centre for Research in Public Law (CIDP) of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), the National Association of the Romanian Bars (UNBR), and the universities of Budapest (Hungary), Florence (Italy), Gdansk (Poland), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Masaryk (Czech Republic).

TRIIAL 2 is the continuation of the TRIIAL project, which ran between 2019 and 2022 (and also included the participation of UPF, with Aida Torres as principal investigator) with the organization of several national and transnational workshops. This project aims to help professionals in the legal field to respond to the challenges of the rule of law and to support the judicial training of justice professionals in order to build public trust in the profession of judges, lines that TRIIAL 2 seeks to continue developing.