Field Notes

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European Registry of Exonerations

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The European Registry of Exonerations (EUREX) is a research database documenting European wrongful-conviction exonerations back to 1970. It was founded by legal psychologists Linda Geven (Leiden University), Jenny Schell-Leugers (Maastricht University), and Teresa Schneider (Lucerne/Marburg), and is hosted at registryofexonerations.eu. As of 2025 it records 144 exonerations across 20 countries.1

An EUREX exoneration requires a final conviction followed by an official post-conviction clearance: a declaration of factual innocence, an acquittal on retrial, a dismissal, or a complete pardon, after new evidence of innocence became available — the same inclusion logic as the US National Registry of Exonerations.

What the registry can and cannot show

The registry’s country distribution tracks correction-channel architecture and research attention more than it tracks error: Norway, the Netherlands, and Germany supply a disproportionate share of entries, countries with active review commissions or active innocence scholarship, while most of Europe has no registry at all. The project itself concedes that the European problem is “very much unknown and difficult to assess” compared with North American registries.1 That self-description makes EUREX the cleanest illustration of Correction channel’s claim at continental scale: the 144 cases are the errors Europe’s assorted channels and researchers happened to catch.

Swedish entries include Sture Bergwall’s eight quashed murder convictions, Samir Sabri, and Joy Rahman — the same journalism-driven cases that anchor Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases.

Significance for the wiki

EUREX is the only cross-European exoneration dataset, and its size is the finding: 144 discovered cases for a continent whose largest single registry country, the United States, has recorded 3,646. The gap measures detection infrastructure, not innocence. Used in Hidden miscarriage risk and correction-channel opacity across democracies.

  1. European Registry of Exonerations, About and Facts & Data pages; country counts are script-rendered and could not be captured per country in this session. For the project’s first research synthesis, Geven, Schneider, Prelipcian, and Schell-Leugers, “The Hidden Toll of Wrongful Convictions — Insights from the European Registry of Exonerations,” Romanian Journal of Victimology (2025): 9-31. ↩↩

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