SoK: Cross-border Criminal Investigations and Digital Evidence
It addresses the problem of inefficient digital evidence exchange in cross-border criminal investigations for law enforcement and legal stakeholders, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature without proposing new methods.
This article analyzes the current state of cross-border criminal investigations, focusing on the challenges and inefficiencies in exchanging digital evidence due to heterogeneous legal frameworks, and aims to provide practical strategies for practitioners to address these gaps.
Digital evidence underpin the majority of crimes as their analysis is an integral part of almost every criminal investigation. Even if we temporarily disregard the numerous challenges in the collection and analysis of digital evidence, the exchange of the evidence among the different stakeholders has many thorny issues. Of specific interest are cross-border criminal investigations as the complexity is significantly high due to the heterogeneity of legal frameworks which beyond time bottlenecks can also become prohibiting. The aim of this article is to analyse the current state of practice of cross-border investigations considering the efficacy of current collaboration protocols along with the challenges and drawbacks to be overcome. Further to performing a legally-oriented research treatise, we recall all the challenges raised in the literature and discuss them from a more practical yet global perspective. Thus, this article paves the way to enabling practitioners and stakeholders to leverage horizontal strategies to fill in the identified gaps timely and accurately.