Europe tries to catch up with the Euro-crooks (News Feature)

By Ben Nimmo Jul 16, 2009, 14:20 GMT

Stockholm - It is easier to be an international criminal in the European Union than it is to be an international crime fighter.

That was the problem facing EU interior ministers Thursday as they met in Stockholm to draw up a five-year plan to boost cooperation between law-enforcement agencies in the 27 EU member states.

'It's a big problem. If you ask police and other people working with these questions, they all ask for more cooperation and more efficient cooperation: I think we have our homework to do,' Sweden's justice minister, Beatrice Ask, said.

One of the EU's greatest achievements has been to abolish the barriers between its member states. Under EU rules, people, goods and money can all travel from one state to the next without having to be checked by police, border guards or customs officers.

Ironically, the only people who cannot take advantage of those benefits are the police, whose legal powers normally stop at the borders of their member state.

That situation has been a godsend for European criminals, who have lost no time in creating their own EU-wide networks for transporting drugs, stolen goods, illegal migrants and ill-gotten gains.

'They are not limited by borders and traditions as most people are: they go for the money, they go for their ideas, they don't care about anything and they have a lot of creativity,' Ask said.

To counter that trend, the EU is trying to make its crime fighting networks as European as its criminals.

One of its first achievements, in 2002, was to set up an EU-wide arrest warrant, making it easier for any EU member state to demand the arrest of a suspect in a serious crime in another member state.

EU officials say that that has reduced the average time taken over extradition proceedings from one year to less than six weeks.

The bloc has also set up specialized agencies, known as Europol and Eurojust, to coordinate cross-border cooperation between police and court services.

But the European Commission, the EU's executive, says that much more needs to be done.

For example, every EU member state has different standards and ways of gathering evidence, making it difficult for prosecutors in one country to use evidence from another member state in court.

Member states also define, handle and judge cross-border crimes in different ways, making it difficult for courts in one country to enforce judgements passed in a different state.

And their police forces simply do not have enough staff who are used to dealing with police in other countries, EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot said.

'They need to be trained better and know who each other are, in order to make sure that we build up trust,' Barrot said.

To deal with the problem, EU member states are now discussing a five-year plan, the Stockholm Programme, to improve cooperation between the bloc's crime-fighters.

 It is the third five-year justice plan in the EU's history.

The programme is meant to target issues as diverse as police and judicial training, European database connections, and finding new ways of taking criminals' money away from them.

But given the sheer complexity of finding unanimous agreement among all 27 EU countries, ministers are not expected to approve the programme before the end of the year, let alone put it into practice.

And that leaves the pressure firmly on existing teams such as Europol and Eurojust as the EU gropes for an answer to Euro-crime.

'They all need to become more efficient and they need to be better at coordinating their activities ... We need to be more efficient from the authorities combating crime, that's for sure,' Ask said.