Police increase co-operation to strengthen EU's eastern border

Confronted by growing concern over illegal immigration and the prospect of Europe's border soon extending to countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, the European Union is to step up efforts to co-ordinate frontier controls. Officials fear that gangs involved in people trafficking from as far afield as China will take advantage of the EU's eastward expansion in 2004 to target the bloc's new eastern limits.

The admission of countries such as Poland to the EU will shift those external frontiers to Ukraine and Belarus. The existing frontier with Russia – in Finland – will become longer.

The EU leaders agreed to boost co-operation among frontier guards and police forces. By the end of this year European countries aim to have started joint operations at the EU's external borders, to have set up pilot projects and created a new network of immigration liaison officers to tackle illegal migration. By the end of 2003 the EU will set up a core curriculum for border guard training and study the possibility of burden-sharing for managing the external border.

But the idea of a European border police force was quietly buried at the EU summit in Seville, in favour of increased co-operation among national governments. Although a group of countries does favour the idea of an EU border force, a feasibility study commissioned on the issue has been extensively rubbished, and countries including the UK and Sweden have made their opposition clear. At Seville, the EU leaders welcomed the study but then took no further action to implement it.

Already EU nations are involved in multilateral border-control operations, but without dramatic results to show for their efforts. In the Baltic Sea and north Atlantic region, 11 countries have been co- operating against illegal immigration and other criminal activities since 1996.

Four EU nations – Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden – participate in this exercise, along with Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (which are expected to join the EU) and Russia, Norway and Iceland. So far the results have been limited. The most concrete operations to combat illegal immigration have been the so-called "green" and the "blue" sweeps – which check land and sea borders.