Today, the e-Evidence Regulation enters into force, creating a clearer framework for cross-border access to electronic evidence across the European Union. As crime increasingly leaves a digital trail, electronic evidence has become central to law enforcement. Around 85% of criminal investigations now involve digital data, and more than half require authorities to seek evidence across borders. Combating terrorism, cybercrime, child sexual abuse and exploitation, and other serious offences that often have a transnational dimension—as well as local crimes such as domestic violence, homicide, and sexual assault—requires timely access to data that is often held outside the investigating state’s territory.
The e-Evidence Regulation will be the first multinational instrument allowing participating Member States to serve legal orders directly on technology providers established in another Member State. This marks a significant advance in international legal cooperation, led by the EU, showing that sovereign states can establish common rules to access digital evidence across borders. As a global technology provider, Microsoft welcomes this important step toward clear global norms for lawful, rights‑respecting access to data for criminal justice and public safety in the digital age.
Over the past five years, the EU has driven a decisive shift away from bilateral mutual legal assistance in individual cases toward principled frameworks for direct cooperation. Instruments such as the Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and the EU e‑Evidence Regulation reflect a deliberate choice: cross‑border access can be both faster and more effective when it is anchored in clear jurisdictional rules, robust safeguards, and meaningful avenues for redress and resolving conflicts of law. Microsoft has actively encouraged and contributed to these efforts as positive innovations for our customers’ security, privacy, and sovereignty.
These frameworks are not technical fixes or procedural shortcuts that undermine the existing rights of our global customers. They represent democratic choices about when and how states can reach across borders in the name of public safety under a shared legal framework. High authorization thresholds, proportionality requirements, and procedural guarantees help build trust between legal systems while protecting individuals’ rights in the pursuit of public safety.
Today, Europe leads the world with a model of public safety grounded in cooperation, trust, and fair notice across borders. The true test of the EU’s innovation now lies in the implementation of the new law. As these instruments move from negotiated text to operational reality, Member States must show that safeguards and speed are not mutually exclusive. Clear procedures, predictable timelines, review mechanisms, and escalation paths will prove the merit of negotiated direct order frameworks and reinforce the EU’s robust rule of law in a volatile world. In particular, the safeguards embedded in Europe’s cooperative instruments must be defended. Cooperation should remain conditional on respect for due process, proportionality, and human rights, whether it happens under the auspices of the EU, the Council of Europe, or the UN.
A critical next step is the conclusion of an EU-US e-Evidence agreement. Such an agreement would connect two mature legal systems through a shared framework for direct, safeguarded cooperation, reinforcing transatlantic trust and establishing a powerful global benchmark for security, privacy, and sovereignty. Together with the EU e‑Evidence Regulation and the Second Additional Protocol, it would help build a more transparent, accountable, and interoperable framework for investigating serious crimes across borders based on the rule of law.
Responsible lawful access to data across borders is ultimately a statement about how democratic societies exercise power in a digitally connected world. With the e-Evidence Regulation, Europe pursues cooperation through a common legal framework that seeks to promote public safety, due process, and fundamental rights. If implemented faithfully and complemented by instruments such as an EU-US e-Evidence agreement, it can help address global public safety and security challenges and establish clearer frameworks for lawful access to data in the modern world, grounded in the rule of law.