Serbian Interior Ministry and OSCE Mission host annual meeting of south-eastern European police chiefs

BELGRADE, 16 December 2005 - Developing better co-operation between police services in the Balkans was the aim of the annual Executive Board Meeting of the Southeast European Police Chiefs Association (SEPCA) that ended in Belgrade today.

The three-day event was hosted by the Serbian Interior Ministry and the OSCE Mission to Serbia and Montenegro. Current President of SEPCA is Belgrade Police Chief Milorad Simic.

Police services chiefs from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro, as well as representatives of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe took part.

"Co-operation between different police services, especially in this part of the European continent, is evidently important. Police services are crucial to the functioning of criminal justice systems, and they simply cannot afford not to co-operate," said Nils Bechmann, the Head of the OSCE Mission's Law Enforcement Department.

"Both the political and economic development of the region depend on strong institutions and their effective co-operation across borders."

Bechmann urged the regional police chiefs to identify and define concrete joint programmes and mechanisms for future co-operation, so that SEPCA becomes "viable and durable, jointly owned and embraced by all police services in the region."

"The normal outcome of creating a new environment in the region, through better connections between police services, is the creation of better circumstances for a more efficient fight against all sorts of crime," said Dragan Jocic, the Serbian Interior Minister.

The OSCE Mission will continue to support the development of regional police co-operation, in order to ensure a more effective fight against crime in south-eastern Europe.