Interinstitutional coordination, key to combating organised crime

It is essential to strengthen interinstitutional coordination in order to more effectively combat organised crime and avoid it taking advantage of the lack of communication or common procedures and systematised exchanges between the various services within countries. To help countries achieve an optimal organisation, EL PAcCTO is supporting the establishment of coordination bodies:

• At the political and strategic level: creation of a national coordination platform, which defines the priorities and strategy;

• At the technical and tactical level: establishment of interinstitutional technical committees, responsible for making proposals for the implementation of the defined strategy;

• At the operational level: establishment of multidisciplinary teams specialised in a type of crime, responsible for investigating the most complex cases involving several countries.

Investigating as a team

Multidisciplinary investigation teams are very common in European Union Member States. They are composed of staff specialised in the same theme (environmental crime, cybercrime, trafficking in human beings, arms, drugs, etc.) from different institutions (criminal investigation police officers, prosecutors, Financial Intelligence Units[1], specialised officials…).

This form of organisation makes it possible to mobilise complementary expertise and resolve problems of interinstitutional coordination by facilitating:

• Real team work by all the actors in the penal chain in one location;

• A flow of information between the actors by giving each team member access to the databases of the institution they belong to and enable them to easily share it with the rest of the team;

• A greater specialisation of the investigators (the team trains continuously by investigating complex cases), which makes the investigation more effective depending on the specific characteristics of the type of crime targeted.

Paraguay: first multidisciplinary team in Latin America

By promoting the exchange of good practices between Europe and Latin America, EL PAcCTO is supporting the creation and setting up of specialised multidisciplinary teams in several Latin American countries on different themes depending on the priorities identified by the countries.

Paraguay is the first Latin American country to sign an agreement for the creation of its first specialised multidisciplinary team (equipo multidisciplinar especializado, or EME in Spanish). It will focus on the fight against corruption, money laundering and economic crime. The signing took place in July 2019 between the various institutions that will make staff available to EME: the National Police of Paraguay, the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of the Public Prosecutor and the Financial Intelligence Unit. This initiative has been driven by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the national coordination platform set up under the EL PAcCTO programme.
 

Exchanging good practices between the European Union and Latin America

During the study visit organised by EL PAcCTO in March 2020, the representatives of Paraguay were able to meet, along with their Ecuadorian colleagues, a number of French institutions specialised in the fight against economic and financial crime[2] – the theme their first EME is working on.

EL PAcCTO is a programme financed by the European Commission and implemented by Expertise France and FIIAPP, with support from IILA and Camões. It covers the entire penal chain and mainly aims to fight against transnational organised crime and strengthen the institutions responsible for ensuring the security of citizens, in 18 Latin American countries.

More about EL PAcCTO: www.elpaccto.eu

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[1] Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) are responsible for collecting financial information and transforming it into evidence to provide input for investigations. They are public structures specialised in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing (AML/CFT). Their work involves gathering elements that allow investigators to identify the offences committed, prosecutors to define them as a criminal offence and prosecute them and judges to sentence the individuals involved, but it also facilitates the recovery of assets. In France, it is the TRACFIN unit.