SINGAPORE – INTERPOL has brought together senior law enforcement leaders from the world’s regional police organizations to discuss ways to coordinate their activities against transnational crime.
Senior representatives from regional police organizations including the African Union’s AFRIPOL, AMERIPOL, ASEANAPOL, the Gulf Cooperation Council’s GCCPOL, the Economic Cooperation Organization’s ECOPOL and European Union’s Europol have come together for the ‘Dialogue on an Effective Multilateral Policing Architecture against Global Threats’.
The two-day (15 and 16 March) meeting at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation aims to create a strong global policing architecture by clarifying the roles of each organization to identify areas for collaboration and encourage greater information exchange.
The dialogue marks the first time that regional police organizations and INTERPOL have gathered to review their current structures and activities, identify overlaps and devise strategies for mitigating them, and chart the course for future cooperative action.
“INTERPOL welcomes regional policing as an important component of an effective global policing architecture,” said INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock, adding that the global nature of crime threats such as cybercrime, terrorism and the movement of foreign terrorist fighters nonetheless requires ‘optimal levels of international police cooperation’ amongst regional actors.
“In the increasingly complex institutional landscape with multiple layers, direct dialogue forms the basis of mutual success. This is critical especially when the stakes are high, when it comes to preventing and fighting international crime,” said the INTERPOL Chief.
Topics to be discussed during the dialogue meeting include the data processing and sharing frameworks used by each policing organization, their different infrastructures for information exchange, and governance mechanisms. In this respect, the goal is to remove any gaps to improve the global exchange of police information amongst the organizations and INTERPOL.