Presidency Seminar on international cooperation in police training: Executive Director presents CEPOL’s vision for the future

Following the invitation of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, CEPOL Executive Director, Ms. Montserrat Marín López attended the Seminar: "Good practices and possibilities for international cooperation in police training", organised by the Ministry of Interior in Aranjuez, on 18 July.

Building upon the seminar that took place last year in Strasbourg under the French Presidency, the event reinforced the idea of contributing to the security of the EU through training. Its aim was to highlight the importance of promoting and strengthening the links between police forces in the EU through joint training, including the training of trainers. In Aranjuez, the CEPOL Executive Director had the opportunity to present key elements of the new CEPOL Strategy 2023-2027, and outline the agency’s vision for the future.

Taking the floor as keynote speaker at the panel session: 'Joint training activities between the EU and Latin America: The way forward',  Ms. Marín López underlined the valuable expertise that Latin-American countries can share with their EU counterparts on topics such as drugs, trafficking in human beings, environmental crime, high-risk criminal networks, restorative justice, etc. ‘One of CEPOL’s ambitions under the new Strategy is to better identify emerging training needs and address them with the delivery of specialised training activities. For this, we work with a global vision for the future, linking the internal and the external dimension of the security of the EU’, she stated.

During her intervention, she also underlined the importance of both the EU- Strategic Training Needs Assessment (EU-STNA) and Operational Training Needs Analysis (OTNA) processes in helping identify which subjects are most suitable for joint training activities addressed to law enforcement officials. As for the regional dimension of training, the CEPOL Executive Director reaffirmed the agency’s intention to explore future synergies and opportunities: ‘We will reinforce CEPOL’s role as a hub for exchanging information on the regional activities’.

‘CEPOL’s first strategic goal is to become the EU Hub for Law Enforcement Training, with a reinforced role in coordination and supporting the cooperation with and between relevant stakeholders through networks, research and mobility programmes and higher education products among national training institutions’, underlined Ms. Marín López and explained CEPOL’s aim to enhance its cooperation with universities, academia and research institutions, in order ‘to keep training innovative, adaptive, and predictive; an essential toolkit in a rapidly developing technological environment’.

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This week, the CEPOL Executive Director will also participate at the Informal ministerial meeting on justice and home affairs in Logroño, on 20-21 July, following the invitation of the Spanish Minister of Interior in April.