30/05/2023
The European NET-COP project ends after successfully coordinating seven West and Central African countries against human trafficking and smuggling
Closing event of the NETCOP project
In a geographical environment characterised by porous land borders and wide maritime fronts, Spanish and French police have been working with their African counterparts in the European NET-COP project to jointly fight human trafficking and smuggling.
La détection des passeurs et des trafiquants et le démantèlement de leurs mécanismes de fonctionnement sont essentiels dans une région où les réseaux de criminalité organisée et de traite des êtres humains sont devenus l’un des principaux obstacles au développement. The FIIAPP, as part of the Spanish Cooperation system, mobilises the efforts of European law enforcement and justice institutions to strengthen the links between security, peace and development in a key region for our external action.
After more than two years of work, the project, whose objective has been to establish a network of contact, work and coordination between the Joint Operational Partnerships (POC) and the Joint Investigation Teams (ECI) that cooperate with the local National Police Investigation Units in the fight against trafficking and irregular smuggling of migrants, has come to an end. One of the major achievements of the project has been to unify the way of working and thus achieve the coordination of the seven African countries involved (Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia, Niger, Mali, Ivory Coast and Guinea),
In this fight against trafficking and smuggling, it was necessary to organise and develop the exchange of operational data between the National Investigation Units of the different countries involved, to establish common working methods and operational trust between the actors of the different national investigation units.
POCs and ECIs are teams of European law enforcement officers working in the field as mentors and collaborating with local investigative units, providing organisational, strategic and operational input in the fight against trafficking in human beings and smuggling of migrants.
In order to achieve the project’s objectives, it was considered that the most effective way would be to design a coordination tool where data would not only be stored, but where the data entered by different countries could be cross-referenced and matches could be detected. In this way, the parties involved would be aware of which different research units might be studying the same persons or organisations.
This coordination tool is based on the GATI (Grupo de Análisis y Tratamiento de la Información) tool, designed by the Spanish National Police, which it has been using for almost 20 years with great success. This software has been the basis for creating the NET-COP coordination tool, which has been adapted to the needs and expectations of African countries. For several months, specialists from the Strategic Planning and Coordination Unit of the National Police have been working with their African counterparts to implement this tool. So far, and in this first phase of the project, it has been installed in Senegal, Gambia and Ivory Coast.
The seven investigative units and the POCs and ECIs, with the support of the Spanish and French police, have jointly defined the parameters that the tool should meet. In addition, they have drawn up a manual of coordination procedures to know how to act in the event of overlaps or cross-checks between their investigations, which will allow them to decide whether to investigate each one separately, to hand over data from one group to another or to work together.
Practical operational exercises have also been carried out between different countries, which have made it possible to show how to work on an investigation between several units, interacting between them with the data entered in the NET-COP tool and which turned out to be coincidental. This has allowed the specialists from each unit to familiarise themselves with the application and get to know each other directly, which will facilitate their future coordination in the fight against organised crime networks dedicated to human trafficking and the irregular smuggling of migrants.
