Comprehensive Capacity-Building Initiative to Prevent and Counter Corruption by Internal Security/Oversight Departments of Border and Law Enforcement Agencies of participating States of the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and Moldova

This project aims at enhancing the capacities of national border and law enforcement agencies of pS of the Western Balkans (Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro), Ukraine, and Moldova in preventing and countering corruption-related cases with a focus on Internal Security/Oversight departments. This is to be achieved by establishing a regional Anti-corruption Platform (ACP) for Internal Security/Oversight departments and by developing an effective and sustainable training programme for internal security officers.

Background

Lack of integrity, including corruption in law enforcement is a multi-faceted, often transnational phenomenon, which represents a key obstacle to good governance and the rule of law. It subverts legitimate governmental processes and undermines public confidence in border and law enforcement agencies. Systematic corruption does present a serious risk to security as it galvanizes a range of national, regional and international security threats, in particular transnational organized crime and terrorist activities.

Hence, being a strong component of complex security challenges, corruption should be addressed and tackled in a holistic manner with the best use of successfully implemented national anti-corruption policies and regulations, existing tools/mechanisms, and internationally recognized integrity standards and practices. Yet, these standards and practices should be regularly assessed, improved, and shared to provide for sustainable solutions of promoting integrity in law enforcement. In addition, corruption should be factored into assessments of risk on a regular basis and a dialogue on basic common principles that should be considered when addressing the risk of corruption in border and law enforcement services across the region should be agreed.

The regional Anti-corruption Platform (ACP) for Internal Control Departments will provide the right forum to examine recent trends, developments, challenges and achievements in preventing and countering corruption as well as promoting integrity in border and law enforcement agencies. The Platform aims at enhancing interagency and regional co-operation, as well as provides the necessary communication tools with a view to improve the overall capacity of Internal Control departments to prevent and counter corruption in a practical and sustainable manner.

This project is a successor to the Project “Anti-Corruption Interactive Training Programme for Border Guards, Customs Services and Anti-Corruption Authorities of Moldova and Ukraine”, which supported officers from border security and management agencies, national general prosecutors’ offices, and national anti-corruption agencies in enhancing their investigative techniques of cross-border corruption cases, public speaking techniques, etc.

During the implementation of the previous anti-corruption project, the beneficiaries of the project, as well as the project manager have identified a number of gaps, which are being addressed by the current project, such as: 1) the absence of a platform for Internal Security/Oversight departments to co-operate and communicate both on national and regional levels with regard to preventing and countering corruption within border and law enforcement agencies, and 2) a lack of specialized knowledge and skills to prevent and counter corruption within their services.

Expected Results

This project aims to achieve the following results:

1. Co-operation between departments of Internal Security/Oversight of border and law enforcement agencies is enhanced through the establishment and support of a regional Anti-corruption Platform (ACP) for Internal Security Oversight departments of border and law enforcement agencies (Result 1) using the framework provided by the OSCE Border Security and Management National Focal Points (NFP) Network.
2. Border and law enforcement agencies’ capacities are enhanced by organizing various practical workshops and delivering a specialized blended interactive training course on preventing and countering corruption. The training course will enable the beneficiaries of the project to better identify corruption risks, conduct preliminary investigations, use operational tools to record and track corrupt behavior and trends, and co-operate with other national law enforcement and anti-corruption institutions following up on investigations of corruption.