CEPOL course 51/2014 Joint Investigations and Team Leadership (JITs)

From 19 to 23 May 2014 the French Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Police, with support from the Finnish Police Academy, organised and hosted at its premises, Saint Cyr au Mont d’Or, training for prosecutors, investigative judges and senior police officers who are or who are looking to become leaders of Joint Investigation Teams.

During these five days, 45 participants from 23 European Member states took part in some very practical training, including running a full joint investigation based upon a real-life scenario of illegal immigration and money laundering; the “Justes Noces” case.

Members and agents of Eurojust and Europol moderated the workshops with assistance from Justice and Law Enforcement experts engaged in JITs. This session was specifically targeted at team leaders, hence the need for new exercises about action planning and coordination.

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The JITs network secretariat and the Case Analysis Unit of Eurojust prepared and ran a new role play exercise divided into two phases:

• Preparation of the operation: the participants were invited to play the role of national authorities during a coordination meeting at Eurojust, with a view to discussing and agreeing on the conditions (timing, legal framework, scope, targets) of a simultaneous action with house searches, seizures, arrests, freezing of assets in the different countries involved.
• Coordination during the action day: to illustrate the added value of Eurojust and Europol (Coordination Centre, mobile office) , the participants had to react to unforeseen events occurring during the action day and requiring further action from the law enforcement and/or judicial authorities involved.

The high satisfaction of the experts, as well as that of the participants, again confirms the relevance of this training model. Training in this area has been developed, refined and delivered over a number of years by the European Police College (CEPOL) and the European Judicial Training Network (EJTN), who, due to the success of the course, have recently been invited to set up and run two JIT workshops in Bosnia Herzegovina and Slovenia.