Fighting Migrant Smuggling by establishing Common Operational Partnerships in Europe with Third Countries

ongoing

The aim of “SCOPE III” is to combat criminal organisations smuggling irregular migrants via the Western Balkan (WB) route towards the European Union (EU) by establishing COPs with the WB6 Third States. SCOPE III continues the “whole route” approach starting from Türkiye (TR) via the WB routes, building on results and experience from SCOPE I. To successfully reach this aim, the applicants (DE, ES, HR, PL) and the WB6 beneficiaries (WB6: AL, BI, XK, MK, ME, SR) will jointly: Build up and strengthen common awareness of migrant smuggling modi-operandi. Build up trust, knowledge and skills and will purchase and implement necessary equipment to set up mirror/parallel investigations, OTFs and/or JITs. Focus intensively on financial investigations (“follow-the-money-approach”) with the aim to seize and recover criminal assets. Support WB6 countries with a broad variety of trainings, workshops and exchanges of best practices. Support MNE in the implementation of a police case management system in order to enable MNE to process investigations, to back alerts, criminal statistics and to share information and data with other EU-MS, EU agencies and WB6 countries digitally. Joint investigations shall lead to the identification of High Value Targets (HVT), setting up OTFs and JITs between the project applicants and the WB6 beneficiaries, supported by Europol and Eurojust. Whenever there are connections to Türkiye, synergies shall be created with SCOPE II. As well a permanent exchange and involvement of the WB migrant smuggling network of prosecutors of Eurojust will be assured. The knowledge, training, operations and purchased equipment provided by this project will lead to lasting capacities and structures and therefore a permanent cooperation network, involving Europol, Eurojust, Cepol, Frontex and EMPACT. Arrests and prosecutions of HVT, seizures and confiscations of financial means will lead to less operability of the OCGs.