Brussels, 26/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - Eleven organisations representing the rail industry, public transport, energy and recycling issued a joint appeal to the European institutions on Tuesday 26 May for them to tackle the problem of metal theft.
Coordinated by the European Rail Community (CER), the organisations call for three-pronged action to tackle what has become endemic. Firstly, they want better enforcement of EU legislation on ferrous metal, such as EU Directive 2008/98, with measures to better identify the buyers and sellers of waste metal in order to facilitate investigations and court cases. Secondly, they call for greater international cooperation and coordination, particularly on information exchange, to clamp down on this trade, which, by its nature, takes place across borders. Finally, the coalition wants common penalties to be laid down at EU level to make sentencing predictable and proportionate to the gravity of the crime.
With the rise in metal prices, gangs of international organised metal thieves have been attracted to the lucrative business of stealing ferrous and non-ferrous metal and there has seen a sharp rise in recent years. The metal stolen is often electrical cabling from railways and therefore presents a real danger for rail passengers and serious losses to a number of parts of the economy, states the coalition in a press release.
Several initiatives to tackle the problem have already been introduced by the EU and the member states, such as the Pol-PRIMETT II project, co-financed by the EU as part of a public-private partnership involving eight member states. A number of cooperation and coordination projects are ongoing under a number of strategies and programmes at national and European levels (the Council of Europe's 2010 Stockholm Programme, a 2013 study by Europol - the European Police Office - of serious organised crime in the EU, the EU Council of Ministers' 2013 priorities for the tackling of various forms of serious and organised crime in 2014-2017, and EMPACT, the European Multidisciplinary Platform against Criminal Threats).
In June 2014, as part of an EMPACT programme, Europol coordinated a large-scale detection operation for metal trafficking in 20 member states, leading to 271 arrests. “Metal theft is not a victimless crime - it can have a devastating impact on individuals, communities and businesses. The overall damage caused by metal theft far exceeds the value of the stolen metal itself and can severely affect key infrastructure and services such as railways, traffic controls and telecoms networks. This crime phenomenon can only be tackled through consistent cross-border law enforcement cooperation, and the use of Europol's information systems and analysis capabilities”, stated Europol Director Rob Wainwright. (Pascal Hansens)