Brussels, 21/05/2001 (Agence Europe) - "The true challenge is now to use these structures to prevent crime", warned the Swedish Secretary of State for Justice, Kristina Rennerstedt, at the first European Organised Crime Prevention Forum, organised in Brussels on 17/18 May. The European Forum organised by the European Commission aims to bring together players from the private and public sectors to exchange information, create partnerships and advise European institutions and Member States on preventing organised crime. It will meet once a year for a full meeting, while its working groups will meet more frequently.
The crime prevention network, put forward by Sweden and France, will be approved by the Justice and Internal Affairs Council on 28 May. It will concentrate on preventing urban and youth crime. The Hippocrates Programme, proposed by the Commission for funding training projects, exchanges and research into crime prevention, is expected to be adopted by the EU at the beginning of June. After an agreement in principle at the previous Justice and Home Affairs Council, discussions focussed on 'comitology'. The EU's Permanent Representatives reached agreement last week, but Council sources suggest that there will not be any Decision at the Council on 28 May, due to translation delays. The agreement will cover the incorporation (into the programme document itself) of arrangements concerning the responsible committee, using the measures usually employed for dossiers under the first pillar, although these measures actually come under the third pillar. It will also make it possible for a Member State to request that a particular area be dealt with as a priority, indicate various sources. This measure will also apply to the renewal of the Oisin, Stop and Grotius Programmes which should be approved at the beginning of June and last until 2002. In the meantime, the Commission is expected to put forward a master plan incorporating all four of these initiatives and the relevant comitology rules.
The Deputy Director of Europol, Willy Bruggeman, said that a master plan was needed since there were too many different initiatives so nobody know who was doing what, but priorities had to be decided and tasks allocated. Commissioner Antonio Vitorino said that such a framework already existed - the Communication on Crime Prevention adopted in November 2000 by the European Commission - which has already been followed by initiatives on preventing human trafficking, cybercrime and the launch of this European Forum. The Commissioner stressed the 'complementarity' of these intiatives which did not see as competing with one another. He added that progress on crime prevention would certainly be one of the major success stories of the Swedish Presidency, explaining that Member States are no longer able to tackle these issues alone. Civil society, industry and services had to be involved, along with action at European level, in insisted.
What is the point of structures like the European Forum? Mr Bruggeman said that it was much easier to talk about prevention than to achieve results. The Director General for Justice and Home Affairs at the European Commission, Adrian Fortescue, commented that crime prevention had only recently been recognised as an EU priority. Ms Rennerstedt said that it was vital to take action, of course, but meetings like the Forum (the launch of which had been welcomed by Europol) should allow ideas to be exchanged and new methods to be found. Willy Bruggeman felt that specific areas should be concentrated on first of all in order to make progress and convince people that crime prevention could be carried out at the European level.
The Forum organised four working groups on 1) the application of the idea of prevention to human trafficking; 2) prevention of credit card fraud. Here the working group decided to organise a meeting on consumer information and another meeting on police information; 3) the role of the private sector in preventing financial and business crime, where the discussions evolved from near tension the first day to dialogue and listening on the second, and priority areas were identified such as corruption, fraud, pirating (bank cards, Internet, etc) and money laundering; 4) preventing the smuggling of cultural artefacts. Other working groups may also be set up. The Swedish Secretary of State hoped that a group would be formed to deal with the sexual abuse of children.