Europol poised to come into its own

Date: 13/06/1996

IF Europol chose to put up its defences, getting in would be no easy feat. Located in an unassuming redbrick building which has served, amongst other things, as a Jesuit convent, Gestapo headquarters and the seat of the Dutch criminal police, Europol fends off unwelcome intruders with an impressive array of tanktraps, revolving steel entrances and a succession of magnetically-activated doors.

Once you have made it to the director's office, however, all is elegant, calm and bright. Soothing grey carpeting muffles your footsteps, modern paintings set off designer furniture and a large collection of personal memorabilia adds a friendly, private touch.

Nothing in the spacious office provides any clues to the fact that its occupant for the last 30 months,

49-year-old German Jürgen Storbeck, is the policeman spearheading the fight against the tidal wave of cross-border crime sweeping through the European continent.

The quiet wings of the former convent, now already home to a staff of nearly 100, have been turned into a workplace for an eventual 300 policemen from 15 European countries charged with fighting against all manners of law-breaking activities dangerous or pervasive enough to threaten the fabric of society or voters' peace of mind.

But for this to happen and for Europol to come fully into its own, the UK and its 14 partners must first settle their long-running dispute about whether the European Court of Justice will be appointed as the judicial body supervising the work of the crimefighters.

The lack of a convention, however, has not kept the European Drug Unit (EDU) - as Europol is still officially known - from branching out into other areas of cross-border crime.

Although the fight against drugs still accounts for three quarters of Europol's activities, its staff has also already been entrusted with intelligence-gathering tasks in areas ranging from trafficking in illegal immigrants to money laundering, stolen cars, and radioactive and nuclear materials.

As Storbeck explains, roughly 12&percent; of activity concentrates on money laundering, 8&percent; on the smuggling of stolen cars - particularly to Central and Eastern Europe - and 4&percent; on trafficking in illegal aliens, with the fight against the illegal trading of nuclear materials accounting for less than 1&percent;.

Once the ratification of the convention has been completed - a parliamentary process Storbeck reckons might take over a year, even once an agreement has been secured at government level - Europol is likely to be entrusted with new areas of activity, such as computer break-ins or terrorism.

“There is a whole catalogue of potential tasks”, says Storbeck, which Europol might gradually take on.

As Storbeck's Italian deputy Emmanuele Marotta explains, the lack of a convention has also forced the crime fighters working in The Hague to juggle with the variety of national laws prevailing in the 15 member states.

The difficulties arising from such intricate legal details are made easier to deal with, however, through a growing network of personal contacts.

“The different privacy protection laws oblige us to phrase requests for information in a different way, according to who we talk to. This leads to a sort of bargaining between national police forces,” he says. “What we have to do now is institutionalise them.”

One role for Europol which is not being envisaged at present, however, is that of a police agency with investigative powers matching or even approaching those of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

“This is something even the convention's ratification will not give us,” says Storbeck.

In practice, Europol's work does and - at least for the foreseeable future - will continue to focus on coordinating crime-fighting activities being carried out by the member states, where cooperation between national police forces is often hampered by historical antagonisms.

As Storbeck explains, the 70-odd officers working in The Hague, backed up by roughly 30 support staff, pool, analyse and distribute intelligence which might otherwise be lost in the intricate maze of Europe's crime-fighting agencies.

The absence of a convention establishing Europol as an autonomous agency, coupled with huge differences in national data protection legislation and national police agencies' understandable reluctance to allow unfettered access to their files, has led to the development of an extremely intricate system of data-channelling and various degrees of access enjoyed by different Europol collaborators, the result of months of wrangling between national governments.

The Europol Convention will at least allow the agency to feed data into a central computer, even if access to it will be carefully restricted. In practice, this will facilitate key routine work such the comparison of telephone numbers which the police know or suspect of belonging to users engaging in major criminal activity.

The institution is also intended to work as a think tank to evaluate crime trends on a European level - a facility the Union is lacking so far.

A small circle of criminal experts working at Europol will use the information stored in The Hague to come up with what Storbeck calls “strategic analysis”, designed to serve as the basis for political decisions on how best to fight crime.

“This is something we will develop more and more. It is vital to evaluate information coming from different sources,” says Marotta.

In the case of illegal drugs, the analytical work will be carried out in conjunction with the European Drugs Observatory in Lisbon, a small, newly-created body set up to analyse trends in drug consumption.

“We will be meeting them every two to three months,” says Storbeck.

In the first year and a half of its activity, claims the management, Europol has already achieved a few notable successes in supporting cross-border undercover activities.

“We are finding an important role in supporting coordination of police activities in member states,” says Marotta.

Already, he stresses, Europol has played a crucial part in supporting “controlled deliveries”, a police technique where crime-fighters allow one or several deals involving illegal goods such as drugs to go through in order to spread the net of arrests as wide as possible, or move up the network of a criminal organisation.

“The aim is to allow agents involved in an operation not to intervene immediately and warn police forces in other countries not to step in,” says Marotta.

To fend off the danger of being swamped with more information than it can cope with, Europol has already adopted a policy of rigorously selecting the data it will store and concentrating on the pursuit of major criminal operations.

“We leave the small-time dealer to national police forces,” says Storbeck. “We will only feed data into the central computer (to be established after the convention is ratified) if really big quantities are involved and the scope of activity goes beyond the national level.”

As both Storbeck and Marotta underline, cooperation with the police forces of Central and Eastern European countries is also becoming increasingly important as more and more crime flows into western Europe from the eastern half of the continent.

According to Marotta, the time when criminal activity could effectively be fought through strict policing of borders has long gone, as the explosion of international trade and transport has dramatically increased the flow of goods and the number of people to control.

“Until 12 years ago, I was responsible for border controls between my country and Austria and Switzerland,” says Marotta. “I was more and more frustrated by the situation.”

As Europol experts explain, most politicians are well aware that the debate surrounding the abolition or retention of border controls within the EU has more to do with voters' fears than with the reality of an effective fight against crime in the last years of the 20th century.

But as Marotta and Storbeck both underline, when set against a centuries-old tradition of police forces jealously guarding their national territories, even the fledgling EDU represents a formidable advance.

“It is already a very good operation,” says Marotta.