Sealing Porous Borders

The European project to create a single market, has dramatically altered the pattern of cross-border crime in Europe.

For the EU’s east European applicant states, joining the club entails reintroducing Visa requirements for their eastern neighbors as well as stepping up border controls. It is the price to pay to join Schengen, the security system that has scrapped internal border controls among most EU countries.

By eliminating internal border posts, the EU’s members have pushed their frontiers to the outer rim of the Union. That makes security at the eastern borders particularly difficult. A long stretch of Poland’s 700-mile border with Kaliningrad, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine is rough forest, which is where the main worry about cross-border crime lies.

Germany has been vigorously helping the Poles, as well as other candidates in Eastern Europe, to tighten up their own eastern frontiers. Yet, no sooner is one EU external border semi-sealed than smugglers shift their routes.

Security at Estonia’s outside borders, for example, remains a problem, although Finland trained Estonia’s border guards and equipped them with modern radar systems. Large consignments of drugs still find their way across the frontier.

Moreover, cross-border crime has expanded to include human trafficking. Behind the lines, hundreds of thousands of would-be illegal immigrants are waiting for their chance to cross the border to the prosperous west making the need for action all the more urgent.

Strict security measures at the frontiers are a prerequisite for admission to Europe’s top club. Poland is to beef up control of its borders under a recent agreement. But several other candidates still have work to do to prevent them becoming a gateway for illegal immigration, drugs and arms trafficking.