CEECs crime gangs create alarm in EU

Date: 28/11/1996

By Mark Turner

ON THE whole, Europe's politicians have few major fears about expansion eastwards.

Although its consequences for the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and structural funds could be severe, recent reports have downplayed the financial impact of enlargement.

But one thing continues to keep those politicians awake at night - organised crime.

As economies merge, but justice systems remain aloof, Europe is fast becoming a haven for the entrepreneurial gangster. As cynics are fond of pointing out, it may well be that the biggest winner from the creation of the single market is the Mafia. And the lack of regulation and administrative muscle in many central and eastern European countries is making it frighteningly easy for criminal organisations to act with impunity.

This year's EU report on organised crime, showing that eastern European gangs are increasingly operating within the Union's borders, has fuelled concern that enlargement without sufficient safeguards could have serious consequences.

Such concerns will be uppermost in the minds of justice and home affairs ministers when they meet their central and eastern European counterparts tomorrow (29 November) to discuss the drugs trade, human trafficking and the protection of witnesses.

If all goes to plan, the CEECs will endorse an EU resolution from 1995 on minimum standards for protecting witnesses and agree to inform the Council of Ministers of the progress made in this area by mid-1998.

The CEECs will also be invited to December's Dublin summit, where the fight against drugs will be high on the agenda.

But informally diplomats admit that, given the huge problems already facing the EU's justice and home affairs pillar, it could simply grind to a halt in a Union of 25 member states.

As the last vestiges of the Iron Curtain come down, criminals may well be rubbing their hands together with glee.

The post-USSR landscape is in many ways a recipe for international organised crime. Take a group of relatively poor countries with lax controls but ambitious citizens, add a huge, rich market with an unending demand for prohibited substances, mix together and season with the might of Russian criminality pushing westwards and you have a potentially devastating combination.

The Baltic states are already experiencing what some have described as an explosion in organised crime, with experts estimating that over 250 groups have moved in on drug and money-laundering operations.

Central European chemists are learning that synthetic drug-making is a big money-spinner, while countries further south continue to thrive as transit regions for narcotics (one way) and stolen cars (the other).

In addition, as Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Anita Gradin pointed out last week, eastern Europeans have discovered how lucrative the European sex industry can be. Twenty murders in Hamburg's red light district this month alone point to violent struggles among eastern European crime groups.

But despite a mountain of anecdotal evidence, it is proving extremely difficult to build up a coherent overall picture. “We still need a real overview,” stresses Europol's Jürgen Storbeck. “For example, we have no idea how much money-laundering Russian or eastern European groups do in the EU.”

Storbeck argues that the most important step now is to develop common methodologies to ensure data is comparable.

In the meantime, a growing number of people fear that strong pressure for new markets could lead the EU to expand prematurely. But, ironically, it could be those very forces of free trade that ultimately force politicians to stamp out lawlessness.

When three shops owned by British opticians Vision Express were bombed in Lithuania this September - allegedly because they refused to pay for 'protection' - the cost of anarchy was brought home in graphic fashion to western investors.

Financial analysts are quick to advise their clients against setting up shop in a country where relations with local crime-lords are as important as those with inland revenues.

Viktor Orban, head of Hungary's parliamentary delegation to the European Parliament, last week highlighted the concern.

“The judgement of Hungary formed abroad is substantially affected by how effectively its government fights organised crime. Countries reliant on tourism must maintain their international image,” he said.

Some 16 million ecu will be spent on the fight against drugs between 1996 and 1999 under the Commission's technical assistance programme for central and eastern Europe (PHARE).

But it is perhaps the Council of Europe which plays the most important role in east-west criminal cooperation via its multilateral conventions. These include the key European Convention on Extradition, signed by all the applicant CEECs except Latvia, allowing signatories to demand that other members hand over wanted criminals.

Other important tools include the European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters and the more recent Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds of Crime.

Many national EU officials feel that the most useful step the CEECs can take is to ratify and implement these conventions, which set up the legal preconditions for practical cooperation.

But it would be unfair of western Europe to wash its hands of all the blame; and central Europeans protest their innocence in much of what goes on, pointing out that a large proportion of the gangs in question come from further east.

They also point out that home-grown demand for drugs in the CEECs is still well below EU levels and does not form the bulk of their criminals' custom.