Confronted with politically motivated violence and profit-driven organised criminality legal
orders extensively rely on covert surveillance measures to detect avert and investigate
offences. The rise of such measures and the increasing role of intelligence-gathering as a
criminal policy tool does however pose considerable challenges to the fairness of criminal
proceedings. This volume seeks to address these challenges by inquiring into how legal orders
in the context of criminal trials and related provisional preventive measures deal with
confidential information that must not be disclosed to the defence. To this end it analyses
the criminal procedure law of numerous European countries as well as related frameworks at the
UN and EU levels. Comparing these findings and adding an analysis of the jurisprudence of the
European Court of Human Rights the volume then outlines ways to safeguard fair-trial
guarantees while respecting the operational needs of investigative authorities and intelligence
agencies. The findings highlight how legal orders have increasingly accepted that the courts
will often consider in the assessment of the reliability of incriminating evidence
information that is not disclosed to the defence at any point during the proceedings. As a
consequence there is an urgent need to develop novel procedural approaches to improve judicial
scrutiny of confidential material by strengthening the involvement of the accused and at the
same time to prevent triers of fact at trial from becoming exposed to undisclosed material.
