Vienna, 15th October 2020 – At the margins of the tenth session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, UNODC’s Global Firearms Programme organized a side event to promote its Community of Practitioners Countering Firearms Trafficking and Related Crimes.
The event aimed presenting the Community of Practitioners to a broader audience and to enable a fruitful discussion between practitioners in order to shape and adapt the Community of Practitioners to their actual needs and interests.
In his opening remarks the Director of UNODC’s Division for Treaty Affairs, Mr. John Brandolino, highlighted that UNODC is constantly thinking of ways to make such fora, tools and platforms of international judicial cooperation and information exchange “more relevant for practitioners, more lasting and forward looking”. He further commended the work that have been carried out by the Global Firearms Programme in the past years to establish the Community of Practitioners “as a platform that allows to keep the dots connected, provides peer to peer learning opportunities and joint capacity-building opportunities”.
The panel discussion that followed brought together a wide range of practitioners from law enforcement, customs and prosecution services, as well as relevant regional and international organization active in the field of firearms trafficking. Paying special attention to the creation of Portugal’s National Firearms Focal Point, which facilitates the exchange of information on national and international level, Superintendent Pedro Nuno Coelho de Moura, Director of the Department on Arms and Explosives of the Portuguese Police described his longstanding cooperation with UNODC and how this engagement contributed to streamline internal structures in combatting illicit firearms trafficking. He concluded that the Community of Practitioners brings added value as it could provide additional training opportunities, including online training and e-learning. Mr. Federico Perrone Capano, Prosecutor at the Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism District Directorate in Bari, Italy, and Mr. Joaquim Rodrigues, Firearms Coordinator at the Forensic and Police Data Management Sub-Directorate of INTERPOL, shared their experience that still too often investigations following the seizure of firearms are focussing on the illicit possession instead of investigating the underlying trafficking offence.
Mr Perrone came to the conclusion that the Community of Practitioners could play its role in bringing practitioners from different countries together in order to conduct this kind of operations, to dismantle trafficking networks and to deprive them of their assets. The importance of close cooperation between multidisciplinary national and international communities of practitioners was underlined by Mr. Louis Letzelter, Analyst in the Weapons Group of the Customs Intelligence Directorate in France. Communities of Practitioners that include practitioners working in different fields of expertise, such as border control, law enforcement, prosecution as well as ballistics and forensics, can foster the “mutual understanding of complex investigations and cases and facilitate the exchange of information that are necessary to combat cross-borders trafficking, given the international dimension of firearms trafficking”. Such community could be of added value, if it is “not duplicating existing networks, but rather creates synergies by coordinating among and cooperating with them, as well as among and with National Firearms Focal Points”, added Major Adriana Maria Toston Diez from the Central Criminal Intelligence Unit of Spanish Guardia Civil and Driver of EMPACT Firearms. Mr. Luis Francisco de Jorge Mesas from UNODC’s Global Programme to Strengthen Capacities of Member States to Prevent and Combat Serious and Organized Crime concluded the panel discussion by highlighting the importance of linking the Community of Practitioners to other networks which are relevant in the fight against illicit firearms trafficking and related crime.
During the side event the panellists consistently identified the specific nature of firearms trafficking as an often-times hidden phenomenon, as a challenge in dismantling trafficking networks and interrupting illicit arms flows. They highlighted some common challenges in current investigative practices, such as the focus on illicit possession offences, and called upon the Community to consider innovative investigative approaches, such as parallel investigative streams and more proactive efforts to investigate the actual illicit flows. Panellists also concurred that information exchange requires a high degree of confidence, cooperation and coordination between practitioners in different jurisdictions and fields of expertise and noted that the Community of Practitioners could greatly contribute to build this confidence base.