Call: Forensic topic 2: Advanced easy to use in-situ forensic tools at the scene of crime

1. Excellent Science
2. Industrial Leadership
3. Societal Challenges

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models.

Securing the society against disasters is one of the central elements of the functioning of any society. There is barely any societal sector which is not to some extent concerned by disasters and related resilience and security issues. Fighting crime and terrorism requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation-related threats. The protection of the European borders requires the development of systems, equipment, tools, processes, and methods for rapid identification. This includes supply chain security in the context of the EU’s customs policy.

On Digital Security, this Challenge focuses on increasing the security of current applications, services and infrastructures by integrating state-of-the-art security solutions or processes, supporting the creation of lead markets & market incentives in Europe, following an end-user driven approach, including for instance law enforcement agencies, first responders, operators of critical infrastructures, ICT service providers, ICT manufacturers, market operators and citizens.

This Challenge should bring together all security stakeholders: industry - including SMEs, research organisations, universities, as well as public authorities, non-governmental organisations and public and private organisations in the security domain. The active involvement of end-users is of high importance.

The Secure Societies Challenge will contribute to the implementation of the policy goals of the Europe 2020 strategy, the Security Industrial Policy, the Internal Security Strategy and the Cyber Security Strategy.

The ambition of this call is both to avoid an incident and to mitigate its potential consequences. This requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation related threats.

This call is divided in four parts:

• Forensics
• Law enforcement capabilities
• Urban security
• Ethical/societal dimension 

Rapid developments in technologies and communication in various fields go hand in hand with new opportunities for forensic science to investigate more and a greater variety of traces, to extract more information from less material, quicker than ever before. In order to to keep the standards of forensic science in Europe at a high level regarding juridical and technological questions. Meanwhile, organised crime and criminals do not limit themselves to regional or national borders. Their crimes are thus leaving traces in multiple countries. Cross border access to evidence has become an absolute necessity for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) and judicial authorities.

Evidence gathering, collection and exchange at EU level should be usable from the field to the judge, independently of the technology used to commit the crimes and of where the crimes have taken place. Rapid developments in technologies and communications in various fields go hand in hand with new opportunities for forensic science.

Proposals for this topic should take into account the existing EU and national projects in this field, such as the Council Conclusions on the vision for European Forensic Science 2020 which foresee the creation of a European Forensic Science Area and the development of forensic science infrastructure in Europe."

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.