Global crime and terrorism need an international response

Public Service Europe

With organised crime and terrorism increasingly operating across international boundaries, Europol Director Rob Wainwright talks to Dean Carroll about the agency's efforts to keep up.

Europol has 620 staff operating out of its headquarters at The Hague, in the Netherlands. High on the agency's agenda are the new forms of crime and criminal organisations, which have received a shot in the arm thanks to technological advances like the internet and smart phones.

Wainwright has strong views on the European Arrest Warrant too. It has faced criticism from pressure groups like Fair Trials International, who have criticised the warrant for its lack of proportionality. In some cases, people have been extradited for going over their bank overdraft limits. "We don't have a specific mandate with the warrant," he explains. "In fact, we are not even routinely copied on the intelligence relating to EAWs. That is a shame because the warrants, therefore, are not being fully informed by the intelligence in our significant databases here – and that is something that could certainly change in the future.

"Eurojust has identified room for improvement including the introduction of some sort of proportionality threshold. If you take the Europol model, which has been developed over 15 years, we have set a commonality of thresholds to our information collection that all member states have signed up to. So we get a fairly uniform standard of data and there is then a more uniform application of our capabilities and work evenly across the EU. That doesn't appear to be the case with the EAW, which is a decentralised instrument. It allows individual member states to apply their general principles in different ways because judicial systems are different in each country. It means that warrants are almost demanded automatically in some countries. It lacks and centralised approach or institutional machinery. There are lessons to be learned here about the way Europol does things."