The European Registry of Exonerations (EUREX) has been launched by legal psychologists from Leiden University, Maastricht University, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and Phillips-Universität Marburg.

It aims to help establish why miscarriages of justice take place and prevent them from happening in the future.

The registry currently contains 115 exonerations from 17 European countries, which provisionally show that wrongfully convicted people spend an average of seven years in prison. Nearly a third (30 per cent) of the cases involve a false confession.

One of the cases already in the registry is the Rosmalen case in the Netherlands, in which a man was wrongly convicted of manslaughter and spent 14 years in prison before being exonerated.

Leiden researcher Linda Geven said: “It is often thought that exonerations are mainly an American phenomenon, but they regularly occur in Europe too. We aim to draw attention to and learn from these wrongful convictions to prevent them from happening again.”

Jenny Schnell-Leugers from Maastricht University added: “They already have databases in the United States that keep track of such cases but we do not yet have a good enough picture of the number of wrongful convictions in Europe.”

Teresa Schneider from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art and Philipps-Universität Marburg said: “I’’s partly due to language barriers that we do not have a full picture of all these kinds of cases in Europe.

“That is why we will be making an urgent appeal at the launch: we are inviting anyone in Europe who knows of confirmed miscarriages of justice to look at the database and submit any cases that have not yet been included.”

Submissions can be made via the EUREX website and the EUREX team can be contacted at info@registryofexonerations.eu.