Based on the positive assessment of the regional IPA2010 project Fight against organised crime and corruption: strengthening the prosecutors’ network of the Western Balkans, which ran from November 2011 until April 2014, the European Commission has again granted a contract to the GIZ-CILC consortium to implement the next phase of the cross-border cooperation between the prosecution offices of the Western Balkans in fighting organised crime. In this phase, which will run from 19 November 2014 until 18 October 2017, UNODC will also be a consortium partner. In addition, the consortium will closely cooperate with EUROJUST and the European Judicial Network in Criminal Matters in order to also bring the Western Balkans prosecution offices closer to the European Union’s judicial authorities.
During an introductory mission, the management team of the project – consisting of former IAP Secretary-General Henk Marquart Scholtz as senior project leader, GIZ Open Regional Fund for Legal Reforms’ manager Christopher Will as project manager Western Balkans and CILC’s deputy director Eric Vincken as project manager international – visited all prosecutors-general in the beneficiary countries (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia) in order to introduce the next phase of the project, to agree on the secondment of EU member states prosecutors to the special serious and organised crime offices in the region, as well as the setting of the project offices and representatives of each of the beneficiaries in the project’s steering committee.
The project is supported by the European Union with an almost 5 million Euro grant, as well as by the German Federal Government.