Brussels, 06/04/2010 (Agence Europe) - The European Platform for Reporting Cybercrime will not see the light of day as a one-stop shop for all European citizens, but will mean that national databases can be centralised. That was the main conclusion of the workshop on the “Platform for Reporting Illegal Content: towards a European platform”, which took place at the 4th International Forum on Cybercrime (IFC 2010), 31 March to 1 April in Lille, France. A “super-platform”, the Internet Crime Reporting Online System (ICROS), should be up and running within Interpol before the end of the year to better coordinate the policing of illegal sites throughout the EU's 27 member states. It will not, however, host a virtual one-stop shop for receiving reports of illegal content, child pornography, for example, from European citizens. Radomir Jansky, representing the European Commission, said that “the platform must not exist only at Europol-level”. The European criminal investigation service must, rather, “make use of existing instruments and build them into the platform, and that is what it has done,” he is reported by the Clubic.com news site as saying. The issue is a complex one: of the 27 EU member states, 16 already have a state system for reporting, four have adopted a mixed public-private system, and seven have yet to decide on their systems. Jansky opined that these countries, Estonia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain, would soon have a system as a result of aid from Europol. Nevertheless, the diversity of arrangements prevents any integration of cybercrime reporting at European level. According to Jansky, there would be no point in moving towards a single reporting platform, but rather towards centralisation of databases. There is also a financial reason for keeping citizens' access points national: the Europol platform “cost only €300,000,” Jansky stated, from a total budget of €85 million in 2010 for the ISEC programme to prevent and tackle crime. This programme deals with more than just online crime, which accounts for only a small part of the budget. Europol police officer Nicola Dileone made a similar point. “It is impossible to manage 27 reporting systems. What is needed is one management system per member state and centralisation of data at European level”. The ICROS super-platform will, then, bring together these databases for full analysis by the “Analytical Work File Cyborg”. Belgian Justice Minister Stefaan de Clerck, announced that Belgium, which will hold the Presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year, will work to improve international cooperation on cybercrime. Following the 2009 launch of the French Pharos platform, 52,352 reports were received. Of these, 6,000 were followed up and 313 resulted in a national investigation and 1,800 were passed on to Europol. (B.C./transl.rt)