 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the Institute. Friends all, and if you're new to the Institute, for the first time you're very welcome indeed. Now, the first thing I have to tell you is that, if you could turn off your phones or turn them to silent, you are allowed to do things like tweet and send messages and things, but you're not allowed to have your phone ringing. So if you wouldn't mind turning off your phones. Mae'r dweud roedd y gallach, ond o'n cymdeithasol, ac mae'n amser i gael y llwysoedd ymlaen nhw yma, Ond yma'n cymdeithasol, ond y gallwch yn ei wneud yn defnyddiad o'r ddefnyddio cyfnod o'r pwysig yn ymlaen nhw. Mae'n fryd i'r rhan o'r dda i'r cyfwyr Robert Kropinko, byddwn i'r dŵr. Robert is head of the European Migrant Smuggling Centre, which operates under the auspices of Europe Hall, and it deals with all issues of smuggling and trafficking in human beings. Just recently they have established or extended their role into a, what they call long name, joint liaison task force on migrant smuggling, affectionately known as JLTMS, if you remember all that. It was launched just in July of this year, and it's there to help cross-border investigations and operations by EU member states and their associates. This whole issue of migrants and migrant smuggling is very topical here in Ireland, and a lot of us in our hearts know that we must deal with migrants, we must take our share of people who want to leave their own country and settle somewhere in Europe. But then our heads get into the whole act, and very often people who will absolutely say I have no problem with migrants, and then something happens, and we're right currently in the middle of that kind of argument down in a place called Uchturard in County Galway, where the community, quite frankly, there's a huge difficulty, it drives people apart from each other, friends, even families, and they don't want to be called racist, but at the same time, when you peel it all down, there isn't any other way that you can talk about if you don't want somebody coming into your community because they're not your Irish neighbours. So it's not an easy topic, and that's why I think this Institute tries to keep us up to date on what's happening. So Robert, we'd love to hear what you have to say, and then there'll be questions and answers. I know we have to be finished at 2 o'clock, so you take whatever time you want, and then whatever time is left, we'll go into questions, so the floor is yours now. Perfect. Thank you very much. Can I propose something, you know, that the police normally orders things what to happen? Can I do my presentation standing and can I ask you to move a little bit because otherwise you'll be able to see it. I won't be able to see it. There's a chair over here, somebody wants to move over here. It's not for the reason that I have to look down on it, I just feel more connected to you. And you're not allowed to ask him if he played a lot of basketball, because he gave it up as a teenager, he told me. Sounded like a good idea then. You know, about teenagers. So my name is Robert Trebinco, I'm a Slovenian criminal police officer working for Europe all in the last six years, in the last three years at the European Migrant's Migrant Centre, they'll be talking about a little bit of how we see things from our side. So what we do, what the situation is, what we see on criminal networks involved in these activities, and of course together with you think about what can be next, what will be next, what should we do, what we shouldn't do. And I'm just in the beginning to tell you that we are focusing only on the migrants smuggling part of migration phenomenon. So we don't deal with border security, we don't deal with support to asylum seekers, refugees, we don't deal with migrants as such. We are trying to focus on the organized crime networks dealing with the criminal phenomenon just as a setup in the beginning. So I have put this slide together because this is how we perceive migration as it happens. I have deliberately stopped it with 2 million but I hope that we agreed that it's a phenomenon that is as old as humankind and it will not stop. There are so many reasons and we can discuss them in the Q&A why is that this figure will go out. So this is how we normally perceive people on the move. And these are the figures for this year. And as they sound extraordinarily big, we have to understand that just a couple of years ago that figure was above a million and then we had 180,000, we had 170,000 and this year we are at 61,000 for the time being. But we are seeing some peaks in the eastern Mediterranean roots from Turkey to the Greek islands and last week was the highest in this year so we are seeing a constant growth with more than 3,000 people arriving only last week so we are seeing some developments of this figure will be for sure much higher. I have chosen this background because we are normally talking about figures on million days, 500,000 of these but these are all human destinies. Each of these figures has a history as a family so this is why it makes it so complicated. It's not one town of cocaine that you seize and then throw away so it comes with a broader picture. And especially the next slide. So 909 assume that on their way to Europe this is the Mediterranean and this is the European streets, rivers and bushes. We have no clue what this figure is when it goes for crossing the Sahara Desert. We have no clue what this figure is outside of the EU. This figure was way above 2000 last year. It is considered to be something around 18,000 since the last migrant crisis or challenge of harbouring. And I have read a very interesting book yesterday where one of the relatives of one of the deceased said my wife did not lost her life. She was murdered. And this is what I will talk about today. So this is where our responsibility lies. It's difficult enough already to understand what 18,000 means. I'm coming from a small country. This is a town in Slovenia that has vanished in the last five years on our doorsteps. But let's move on to the different side. So this is unfortunately the situation that our border guards, our police officers, our customs officers very often see on a daily basis. This is a truck. It can be a train. It can be a van. It's not uncommon that we would see 15, 16 people squeezed in a personal vehicle, in an SUV and then driven across Europe. And why it is so challenging is because each of these people have a different story. So there is a huge proportion that are seeking some protection. There is a proportion that might become victim of trafficking networks. There are frameless among the smugglers who are organizing these journeys. And of course the biggest fear in the general public, people who might become radicalized either already arriving like that or become radicalized and do something horrible once they arrive. And that's what fuels the discussions and the fear and is turning the vicious circle. And that's what makes it so difficult to discuss this with cool heads and with using the brains and not so much the gut feeling and everything else. So what do we do at Europe? As I said earlier, we are responsible for prevention and suppression of serious and normalist crime and terrorism when two or more member states are involved. We don't have any executive powers but our key tools are our experts, our databases, our overarching view but I will come to it later. So we are divided into serious and normalist crime, cyber crime and terrorism to simplify the whole structure. This is a very important picture because we are of course an EU entity and we have strict legal regime with whom we can cooperate operation. So with whom can we exchange personal data with whom can we jointly work on investigations. It is extremely easy for us with the blue states. This is the EU member states. Everything is possible, simplified. Then we have the yellow states. These are the countries that in the past we have checked that their data protection regimes are on the same level as ours and almost all information exchange with them is possible. And then it becomes tricky, especially when it goes for migrants' money, then we have the grey states. We are not allowed to share a single bit of operational data with them. We are however allowed to receive data from them but we cannot send them personal data back. And if you are familiar with criminal investigations it is a dual way situation. You cannot do it otherwise. And this is the biggest challenge. This is how do we make sure that these countries build up the capacity that they come to the standards that we would like them to have in order that we can fight these criminal networks outside of Europe. Because yes, we can agree once. People are smuggled to Europe and then across Europe. I think our options are becoming rather limited. So we have very broad on our secure exchange network. It's combining more than 1,100 authorities across Europe and globally. All the blue and yellow states from the previous slides are linked to our systems. We have a huge group of liaison officers sitting in our headquarters in The Hague. More than 250 colleagues from more than 40 authorities 40 countries from across the globe. 3 Irish colleagues from customs and excise. And we have a set of IT solutions that are allowing us to bring the European law enforcement predominantly closer together when it goes for fighting serious and longings. So what do we see on our side? Many laws for criminal networks. We no doubt that this is a huge market where the demand for the criminal services is not going away. They are very innovative, they are very fluid when it goes for the adoptions to our countermeasures and it goes to countermeasures of the border guards on difficult technical and legal obstacles put ahead of them. And they are exposing the migrants to numerous risks on that journey. This is a picture taken in March this year when we were hosting the heads of migrant smuggling units from the EU and broader in our auditorium. So almost 80 people were squeezed on such rubber boat. So the double of the people present here put that boat in the centre from Morocco towards to Spain. This boat luckily was intercepted by the Spanish authorities so that the people were rescued. A little bit more than 55,000 people only last year were put on similar boats and sent over that. And you can calculate 80 people, the cost of one of these rubber boats is 1,000 euros, 1,500 euros and you know how lucrative the criminal business is. Why did we bring the boat to the head? We have asked the Dutch forensic institute to take a look at this boat from a scientific point of view. Because what we are trying to do, apart from arrest and prosecution and everything else, is to disrupt the support mechanisms that the smuggler is using. We need some scientific proof that these boats are produced solely for the criminal purposes because the proportions, the security measures, and no legal use of this boat would be. We made an estimation so that the engine used for this is a similar engine than you have on a scooter. You can imagine 80 people floating through the Mediterranean. We have proven that the life vest were not, they had a fun fact, they had a sign on not to be used in open waters. So this is the level of risk that people are exposed to by smugglers when put on these boats on whichever route of the Mediterranean. This is the other tragic aspect of it. I have already mentioned 16 people were put in this SUV that crashed. Four people died in Greece a couple of weeks ago. In one weekend we had nine fatal incidents in Europe, involving cars speeding, trying to escape from police, driving into rivers ruthless as you can only imagine. Now coming to what does the European Migrant Smuggling Centre at Europe do? We are very proud to be the information hub of the EU law enforcement when it was for migrant smuggling related issues. Not only that we have a huge database on smugglers that are involved in these criminal activities, on their contacts, on their a lot of sensitive data related to it, which allows us to not only to support the member states in both operations and strategic developments, but also to advise them what are the directions that we should be more careful to. I have my colleagues deployed to both Greece and Italy where they are working in the hotspots together with Frontex and together with the national law enforcement authorities, trying to identify the smugglers, but also trying to identify those who might pose a threat to our securities from the people that are arriving there. We are hosting also this new joint liaison task force. So the entity where every even Tuesday we sit together all 40 countries present, where we update each other what is new, what is planned, what are the identified changes in both of subparandi, what should we do next. This is the regular meeting, and then we have a talks months when it goes for concrete investigations. It clearly shows because we normally squeeze them in rooms smaller than this, so we are forced to work very close together. But the dedication coming from the member states, there is so much will and energy to do something, it's over and over again. So this is just a few figures on what we are supposed to on a yearly basis. So just for you to understand what is the case, 3600 new cases were reported to Europol only last year, on mining smuggling alone. So every day we get 10 information on a new case that two or more member states is investigating a criminal network dealing with mining smuggling. And then there is another single week that we would not have a sort of support to an action day in a arrest phase, some other activities in the member states. Every single day or one or two, concrete operational reports are sent to the member states, allowing them to understand better what the situation is out there. And what is very important, especially for this area, where there is a lot of political developments, we are reducing a set of strategic documents on a daily basis where we are focusing not only on the new models of Perandi, on the new routes that are being taken, but also all other details that are changing. And we are feeding not only the law enforcement across Europe, but also the decision makers in Brussels. Because there is a lot of political discussions and they have to be coming back to the beginning, they are very emotional and they have to be as fact driven as possible if we want to shake right policies for this important area in the future. On the weekly basis we produce the European monitoring report where we highlight all developments in the last week and in two weeks we will have the number 400 already produced. This was a tool that we developed in 2015 and in 2015 where there were so many developments from one day to another across Europe with these huge caravans moving the law enforcement being exposed to unprecedented challenges and that we helped the law enforcement to understand what can they anticipate, what will happen tomorrow, where will the routes change, what are the mechanisms that are influencing. So, the last two slides. We do see constant changes in the routes and the changes can be provoked either by the law enforcement activities either by change policies, either by other elements. The networks are adopting their activities very quickly and we see an increased number of very dangerous consignment methods, as we said. Cargo trains are the latest trend, reappearing once again high number of people being stacked into the personal vehicles. Because we had now a number of cases on the Western Barton with 45-47 people squeezed into a van. You might still remember the tragic incident from 2015 when 71 people died on the highway in Austria. So we are every day discovering similar modus operandi but for luck we did not see the reposition of that tragic incident. But I'm afraid that one of these days we will run out of luck where the people being smuggled in that way will run out of luck. What we are seeing is an increased use of fraudulent documents but also law enforcement stolen documents for facilitating the smuggling activities via the air routes. There are daily apprehensions on different airports across Europe where migrants are trying to reach their final destinations also with the use of those. Misuse of asylum proceedings across Europe and of course sham marriages that allows them to regulate their status in different countries. So this was a short overview from my side. I wanted to keep it as short as possible in order to allow us to have a discussion. I hope we can answer. Thank you very much indeed.