How slow is the MLAT process between US and EU?
Executive summary
The Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) channel between the United States and EU is widely described as slow: U.S. officials have acknowledged average response times measured in many months, and practitioners report cases stretching toward a year or more [1] [2] [3]. That slowness has prompted policy fixes, new U.S. processing units, and proposals for faster e-evidence instruments — but tradeoffs over sovereignty, privacy, and legal safeguards persist [3] [1] [4].
1. The baseline: measured delays in months, not days
The Department of Justice has publicly acknowledged that average MLAT response times can be about nine months, a figure cited by analysts as emblematic of systemic delay in handling requests for electronic evidence located in the United States [1]. Independent practitioner guides and law firms report even longer exchanges in some bilateral relationships — for example, communications-data exchanges under MLAT channels between close allies have been reported to take up to thirteen months [2]. Reviewers and courts have described the process as routinely taking “one or more years” in complex cross-border investigations [3].
2. Why MLATs are inherently slow: centralized, legalistic, and overloaded
MLATs route requests through centralized national authorities — in the U.S. the Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs — where requests are screened, assigned to prosecutors, and presented to courts for validity and execution, a process that adds layers of administrative and judicial review absent from voluntary or direct cooperation channels [5] [2]. The sharp rise in demand for electronic records stored on U.S. servers has strained that centralized system, producing backlogs that officials and analysts describe as unsustainable without procedural or resourcing changes [1] [3].
3. Reforms and stopgaps: new units, EU reviews, and e-evidence proposals
To respond to backlog, the DOJ has created specialized teams — including a centralized “cyber unit” to process electronic-evidence MLAT requests — and devoted added resources to incoming requests, steps meant to accelerate throughput though not to eliminate fundamental procedural steps [3] [1]. At the EU level, periodic reviews of the 2010 EU–U.S. MLAT framework concluded that the instrument generally functions but recommended practical improvements such as better knowledge-sharing and greater use of technology to speed transmission of requests and evidence [6].
4. Alternatives and tensions: CLOUD Act, e-evidence accords, and civil-liberty pushback
Policymakers have pursued alternatives to MLAT slowness: the U.S. CLOUD Act and bilateral implementing agreements aim to permit direct lawful-access routes to provider-held data in certain cases, and EU proposals for e-evidence instruments seek to harmonize and expedite cross-border production of electronic records [4] [7]. Proponents frame these as necessary to keep pace with digital investigations; critics — notably European civil-liberties advocates — warn that bypassing treaty channels risks weakening judicial oversight, data-protection safeguards, and the very due-process protections MLATs were designed to respect [4] [7].
5. Practical takeaways and reporting limits
Practically, investigators and defense lawyers should expect that an MLAT between U.S. and EU authorities will often take many months and frequently a year or longer for electronic-evidence requests unless the case benefits from expedited or voluntary provider cooperation, specialized processing units, or a bilateral shortcut such as a CLOUD Act agreement [1] [2] [3]. Reporting reviewed here does not provide a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute statistical distribution of MLAT processing times by case type or country, so precise current medians or modal delays cannot be asserted from these sources alone [1] [3].