Police cooperation: action against international crime (drugs, traffick in persons, illegal migration)

OBJECTIVE: to combat the spread of international crime along transport routes. CONTENT: in order to continue to improve operational cooperation between the police forces of the Member States, this draft joint action, based on Article K.3 of the Treaty on European Union, proposes a series of measures aimed at organising joint operations to combat the spread of international crime along transport routes (e.g. by road, rail or air). This concerns operations in several (or all) Member States at once, involving a heavy deployment of police forces which concentrate their intervention on a form of crime linked to a transport route and proceed by means of heavy surveillance and research, targeting the route in question. The aim of these concerted operations is to achieve maximum police success, mainly through questioning, to iron out the coordination of joint police interventions and the functioning of communications and to gather new information on criminal behaviour and operations. EUROPOL will be directly involved in the implementation of actions resulting from the draft joint action. Once the pilot phase of this project has been concluded, an assessment of the experience gained will be conducted with a view to improving the strategy for transport routes. The Member States, in cooperation with EUROPOL, will in particular study the conclusions to be drawn from the elimination of the Union?s internal borders (and the subsequent elimination of checks on people at those borders) in light of the fact that the police authorities no longer have the same means as before of intervening at one of the main strategic lines of defence against international crime.�