Commission opens €6.5 million for digital investigations and common standards for access to electronic evidence

The European Commission has opened a €6.5 million call through the Internal Security Fund (ISF) for projects that develop the capacity of police and judicial authorities to conduct digital investigations and for technical standards that make data and communications systems interoperable. Of the total budget, €5 million is earmarked for digital investigations and €1.5 million for standardisation. The deadline for submitting projects is 15 December 2026.

At a glance The call has a total budget of €6.5 million through the Internal Security Fund. Five million euros are intended for digital investigation projects, while €1.5 million is allocated to standardising data formats and communication protocols. For digital investigations, the EU contribution per project may range from €1 million to €2.5 million; for standardisation, it may not exceed €1.5 million. The Commission wants more technical tools for police and justice, greater operational capacity and the exchange of best practices. The deadline for submitting applications is 15 December 2026.

The call’s two components address different problems within the same investigation. The first concerns the authorities’ ability to identify, collect and analyse evidence in an environment where communications, documents, transactions and criminal activity leave digital traces. The Commission says the funding should help increase the operational capacity of police and judicial authorities, ensure the availability of technical tools and promote solutions and best practices that can be used in investigations.

This wording is broader than funding a single type of software or a predetermined technology. The call starts from the problem of institutional capacity: tools must be capable of being integrated into the work of authorities investigating cybercrime or other offences in which digital data become evidence. The document published by the Commission does not announce selected projects or suppliers that have already been awarded funding; it is the stage at which proposals are being requested.

The second, financially smaller component concerns standardisation. The Commission is allocating €1.5 million to projects aimed at ensuring the compatibility of data formats and communication protocols, and says that future technologies must enable lawful access to data under EU law. The emphasis on standards points to a problem that cannot be solved merely by purchasing more advanced tools: electronic evidence must be able to move between systems and authorities without becoming unusable because of incompatible formats.

In a cross-border investigation, the same evidence may pass through several systems. A service provider may transmit the information to an authority in one Member State, which may transfer it to prosecutors, after which the data may need to be used in judicial proceedings or exchanged with an authority in another state. If the format, metadata or authentication mechanisms differ, the time required to obtain and process the evidence increases, and in some cases problems arise concerning its integrity or use in court.

That is why the Commission explicitly links standardisation to digital evidence. Common data formats and compatible communication systems should allow police and judicial authorities to request, transfer and process information more quickly. This aspect becomes even more relevant with the entry into application, in summer 2026, of the new European rules on electronic evidence, which aim to enable authorities to obtain certain data more quickly from service providers in other Member States.

The Commission also brings artificial intelligence into the logic of the call, but not as a separate funding objective. The call’s webpage says that standards for key technologies, including AI, must take into account the specific needs of law enforcement authorities. This may concern how data are stored, accessed, interpreted or transferred when the technologies used by companies or authorities are built around new digital architectures.

This wording does not, however, amount to granting police a general right of access to any system or data. The Commission explicitly uses the term “lawful access”, and the funded mechanisms must remain compatible with EU law. In the field of electronic evidence, European legislation provides safeguards for data protection and the possibility of remedies for the persons concerned and the providers asked to supply the information.

The tension between access by authorities and the protection of communications security is particularly visible in the encryption debate. As part of the ProtectEU strategy, the Commission is working on a technological roadmap for solutions that would enable lawful access to encrypted data, while declaring that cybersecurity and fundamental rights must be protected. A group of experts including specialists in law enforcement, encryption, communications, standardisation and fundamental rights is expected to contribute to this work.

The September call does not determine the outcome of this debate and does not itself fund a European decryption solution. Its standardisation component is broader and concerns the compatibility of future technologies with the legal and operational requirements of police and justice. The distinction is important because data access, technical standardisation and breaking encryption are related issues, but they are not synonymous.

Project budgets indicate that the programme is aimed at a relatively limited number of interventions. For the digital investigations component, the European contribution may be a minimum of €1 million and a maximum of €2.5 million per project. In the case of standardisation, EU support for a project may not exceed €1.5 million. Compared with the total budgets of €5 million and €1.5 million respectively, the ceilings suggest projects large enough to produce reusable tools or standards, rather than microgrants distributed among a large number of beneficiaries.

The Internal Security Fund is the European instrument intended for cooperation on security, the prevention and combating of crime, and strengthening the capacities of national authorities. The fund’s programming documents provide, in the areas of cybercrime and digital investigations, for developing the expertise of judicial and law enforcement authorities, cross-border cooperation, implementation of EU legislation, and the development or use of technical tools. Within the programme’s overall framework, the participation of law enforcement or judicial authorities is a central element of projects in this category, although the exact eligibility conditions must be checked in the official call documentation before submission.

The €6.5 million is therefore not money already awarded to national police forces or technology companies. Proposals may be submitted until 15 December, after which projects must be assessed in accordance with the conditions of the call. Only selected projects will be able to receive EU co-financing, and the amount ultimately contracted will depend on the outcome of the procedure.

The more important development is the direction in which European funding for combating digital crime is moving. It is no longer enough for each country to purchase its own tools. Investigations increasingly depend on interoperability between systems, cross-border access to evidence and the ability of technical standards—including those now being written for AI and other emerging technologies—to operate within a common European legal framework.