Let’s be honest. You are not going to plough your way through the 657 pages of the newly published Effective Criminal Defence in Europe, nor even the more accessible 30-page summary. However, you should know what you have missed. These reports have important lessons relevant to the upcoming battle for the future of legal aid.

The reports were the product of cooperation between two universities (Maastricht and the West of England), two advocacy organisations (Justice and Budapest-located Open Society Justice Initiative) and assisted by researchers in nine European counties. The idea was to compare how criminal defence is conducted on the ground with how it should be undertaken to comply with the standards of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Politicians throughout Europe have found it hard to swallow the idea that national criminal justice systems should meet international standards, particularly in relation to legal aid. There is some justification for this. Historically, the two jurisdictions that came out of the study best, Finland and the UK, developed their legal aid systems without any real reference to international standards. Our legal aid scheme actually began covering legal aid in divorce cases; these would not be covered by the restrictive provisions of the ECHR. Accordingly, this area is likely to be slashed by Ken Clarke in legal aid’s forthcoming Armageddon. Finland only became a member of the Council of Europe in 1989 and signed up to the convention the year after. Yet the pattern of its legal aid – a mix of public defenders and private practitioners – was determined well before then.

A recent Scottish case in the UK Supreme Court illustrates how matters have developed. The Scots never followed their southern neighbours in establishing legislation along the lines of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. They have no similar police station duty solicitor scheme and a suspect may be questioned six hours after arrest in the absence of a lawyer. A recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights, Salduz v Turkey, ruled that there must be an opportunity for a lawyer to be present during a significant police interview. The Scots, rather unwisely, sailed on regardless, confident that this might apply elsewhere but not to them. Their highest court, the High Court of Justiciary, obligingly agreed in a recent case, Cadder v HM Advocate. However, that cut little ice with the seven-member bench of the Supreme Court that subsequently heard the appeal. It has reserved final judgment until October but gave the Scottish lord advocate, Elish Angiolini QC, such a bruising time that the Scottish Legal Aid Board is already rushing in a scheme before judgment. The real nightmare is the fate of all the past cases where defendants may, in consequence, wish to contest their conviction. The European research was brought to the notice of the Supreme Court through a third-party intervention by Justice.

Cadder has enormous relevance to England and Wales because Clarke is known to have the police station scheme in his sights. He wants to reduce the scheme to telephone advice – if this would be compatible with the ECHR. Hopefully, Cadder will prove useful as the Law Society and others wade into the debate about restricting legal aid cuts. Salduz certainly is.

European human rights standards on criminal defence are relevant to our jurisdiction in other ways. The EU responded to 9/11 by creating the European Arrest Warrant. This significantly eases the process of extradition by restricting opportunities to contest a request. In 2008, we surrendered 310 people under the warrant and got 78 back. Most of these cases, though not all, are fairly serious. The warrant is based on the notion of ‘mutual recognition’ of court judgments and, thus, requires trust by a UK judge that, to take two examples, a court in Poland or Hungary will deal with the case to ECHR standards. Our research suggests that this cannot be assumed. In Hungary, defence lawyers are chosen by the police or prosecution. Neither country has sufficient monitoring of quality nor, frankly, levels of remuneration. As a consequence, legal assistance is pretty perfunctory.

The problem is that the Council of Europe lacks any way of enforcing systemic reform. Its court can intervene only when a case is before it. The European Commission proposed that, to counterbalance the European Arrest Warrant, it would take on the role of enforcing minimum standards. Its initial proposals were scuppered by a small group of countries led by the UK and Ireland in the name of national sovereignty. Last summer, the commission thought it had got agreement during the Swedish presidency to the ‘Stockholm Programme’, a phased tackling of necessary safeguards. The latest soundings from Brussels suggest that its future may now be in difficulty in the face of a concerted attempt to apply the safeguards to transnational cases only. This is likely to prove hard to make work and carries the unattractive inference that states may treat a small number of cases, largely involving foreigners, according to convention standards, but not the vast bulk that involve their own citizens.

So, you don’t need to read the research to get the basic message. Legal aid is variable and threatened throughout Europe. How convenient it would be for states if they could assume that all countries, including the UK, comply with the international standards of the ECHR. They don’t. And we should make that pretty clear as cuts threaten a legal aid scheme that has provided access to justice for thousands of beneficiaries.

Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice