Professor Katalin Ligeti, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, will be principal investigator for the EUropean LAWyers training on EPPO (EULAW) project funded through the European Commission’s DG Justice & Consumers – Justice Programme.
At the core of the project, The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), was established in 2017 as an “independent and decentralised prosecution office of the European Union, with the competence to investigate, prosecute and bring to judgment crimes against the EU budget, such as fraud, corruption or serious cross-border VAT fraud.”[i]
The University of Luxembourg will be joined by partner universities and organisations from Italy, Bulgaria, Croatia and Spain to promote knowledge of the EPPO among defence lawyers through enhancing awareness, creating easy-to-use training materials to help lawyers deal with cases affected by the EPPO and fostering mutual learning and constructive dialogue between lawyers coming from different legal backgrounds. The project will also implement “train the trainer” initiatives in order to increase the capacity of trainers providing guidance on the EPPO. A series of national and transnational training events in 5 EU Member states (Italy, Luxembourg, Hungary, Spain and Bulgaria) will be organised throughout the duration of the project.
“An important component of the EULAW project is raising awareness of the European dimension of the legal profession”, says Prof. Ligeti, “We will be focusing on the challenge of intersecting the EPPO Regulation with national law and judicial systems and dealing with cross-border cases as well as with national cases affected by EU law.”
Kicking off in January 2021, the project will last for a period of two years and benefits from a total of 473,000 EUR of funding to be shared among project partners.
[i] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/cross-border-cases/judicial-cooperation/networks-and-bodies-supporting-judicial-cooperation/european-public-prosecutors-office_en#mission