Fiddling while Rome burns: National Ministers wrangle while Organised Crime makes hay

6.24.44pm BST (GMT +0100) Tue 5th Oct 2004

Bill Newton Dunn, MEP for the East Midlands, has expressed growing dismay that the EU's Council of Ministers has failed to agree on a new Director of EuroPol, the EU's Law Enforcement Agency in The Hague, Netherlands.

Dr Jürgen Storbeck, the outgoing Director of Europol, has been in the post for the past five years. His term came to an end on 17 September 2004.

Bill Newton Dunn, who sits on the European Parliament's Committee on Citizens' Freedoms, Justice and Home Affairs and is leading the development of a new European Parliamentary Intergroup on Law Enforcement and Organised Crime, said:

"Dr Storbeck has been an outstanding success, but the 25 national ministers in the EU's Justice and Home Affairs Council, including one from the UK, have been wrangling for months - behind closed doors, in their usual secretive and undemocratic way - over who his successor should be.

"Some ministers are pressing for Dr Storbeck to be reappointed. Others are pressing for a different nationality to have a turn. On behalf of our citizens, who pay the ministers' salaries, it is unforgivable that no Director has been appointed. Truly, national ministers are bickering in a petty nationalistic way, in secret, and are leaving organised criminals to press on with their drug smuggling, trafficking of women and children, internet fraud and smuggling of counterfeit goods."

The deadlock remains, in spite of evidence in Europol's 2003 EU Organised Crime Report that the estimated number of organised crime gangs increased from 3,000 with 30,000 members in 2002, to 4,000 with 40,000 members in 2003.

ENDS

Note to editors:

The three candidates for the post in June meetings of the Council of Ministers were the present Director, German Jürgen Storbeck, Frenchman Jacques Franquet (Director of the International and Technical Police Cooperation Service (SCITP)), and senior Italian officer Emanuele Marotta. Europol's previous Deputy Director Mariano Simancas is currently Acting Director.