 afternoon everybody and you're very welcome to the Institute. Just a few housekeeping things. If you could switch your phones to silent please. But we do encourage you to tweet at handle at IIEA for those of you who tweet or Twitter or whatever. Also the initial speech by Mr Ball will be on the record but the questions are under Chatham House rules which means you can use the information but you don't assign it to anybody in particular. So good afternoon again and thank you for being here. This afternoon we're very lucky to have the Executive Director of Europol Catherine de Ball and she is going to talk to us about the future of Europol. Most of us have an idea of what Europol does but we're going to get a better idea today. And she's going to kind of talk about the links between operational and political priorities. When Mr Ball became Executive Director in May 2018 she prioritised learning about the needs and expectations of EU members because some members might have had bigger expectations of Europol and others might have been just thinking well they're just there and if we need them we'll call them. But every country now has liaison officers there. So Mr Ball has been doing a tour of all the EU capitals meeting the liaison officers, meeting the people working in crime fighting and so in her papers and in her work onwards she will be using that experience that she's been getting from all these visits and her visit here to Ireland is one of such visits. She thought it had meetings with the various sections of Garda Shecona this morning and today now we are getting the real thing, the real story and so Mr Ball will give her talk and then there'll be time for questions. So if you'd like to take the stage there I'm going to give you a round of applause. And I forgot to address Ambassador from Belgium is here as well. My apologies Ambassador. Thank you and good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank Mrs Donahue for inviting for the invitation today. And I would like to thank the Institute for International and European Affairs because you always have been a very good partner for Europol. My predecessor has attended different meetings over here and your input is always very much appreciated by Europol. I will start by saying something about my experience of my first 10 months in Europol and other priorities and the new strategy of Europol for the future. And then I will reflect on how will we link these operational priorities to the policy discussions in Brussels on the European agenda of security. In my former life I was a commissioner general of the Belgian federal police and my perception was at that moment that Europol was a well functioning organisation. I had the impression that a lot of my colleagues, even myself, we didn't know so much about Europol but when there was an urgent need we could call them and they helped us. And there was a trusted relationship with the agency. So I decided when I became director to visit all the member states to listen to the feedback what is your evaluation of the agency and what are the expectations from your view for Europol for the future. Based on this input we developed internally a new strategy for the agency and we proposed this new strategy to the police chiefs, to the law enforcement agencies and we discussed it with the management board and it has been endorsed in December in the management board. And overall my perception seemed to be right because there was an overall good evaluation from Europol. It's an organisation that is appreciated. Also the member states they invest a lot in Europol by sending very good investigators, good people to Europol for a limited time frame because we have contracts of nine years. And this answers to maintain the dynamics in the organisation and to have enough credibility and enough creativity and to keep the direct link we need with the investigators in the field in the member states so that we know that what we do adds value to the work of the investigators on the field. The new strategy is called the 2020 plus strategy because we have priorities on the short term, middle long term and long term. So it will take some years to implement the strategy. We have defined five strategic priorities for Europol. The first one is to be the EU criminal information hub. Why is this so important? Because we want to avoid duplication on European level because we are not the only agency involved in law enforcement. There is also Frontex, there are other agencies so we have to be clear about who is going to do what. And the second important thing for us is information sharing and handling the mass data we are confronted with. What will we do? How will we be sure that the data we get will be used as qualitative data for an investigator? The second strategic priority is deliver agile operational support. We had the cases in Slovakia and Malta with the journalists that are murdered. The support from Europol was asked by the countries themselves. It was completely new for us because we were used to a headquarter-based agency and now we had to go on the field and help investigators on the field. More and more of these questions are coming in so this means that we have to adapt our way of working. The third one is being a platform for European policing solutions in the European Union. The law enforcement community, the police community is confronted with a lot of the same issues. How do we deal with new technologies? How do we develop new technologies? How do we use them in our processes? So there was a big demand from the chiefs to be a platform that they can share the policing solutions that one country is knowing what is going on in another country and it can be a solution for the developments in my country. Be at the forefront of innovation and research for law enforcement we all have limited resources so it's important that we pool these resources that we put it together and that we don't have too much duplication on police level in the whole of the Union and then for our internal cuisine we want to be the model law enforcement agency of Europe when we talk about accountability, transparency, good governance, diversity and staff engagement. I will not focus in depth on all the five I will only focus on the areas that are most important at the policy level. The first one is information management. This is of key importance for us and for the whole of the law enforcement agencies in the whole of the Union. We have the EU interoperability agenda very important for the European Union because we have a connection in between different databases. For law enforcement it's very important to have access to the databases and how will the access be organized? What is the legal framework we will have to work in? How will we put it into place? The improved access will be there and we will have the possibility to use more data. We talk about the Schengen information system, the SIS. We talk about the new system for applications for electronic visas, ATAS. The visa information system, VIS and the entry exit system. Technically, it is a very complicated exercise we are making, but what the focus for us should always be is the operational added value of the interoperability. We can never forget about that. What are the benefits? For law enforcement, this interoperability and the information management is of key importance for the future because it will give us the ability to assess threats more accurately and to monitor movements of terrorists and serious and organized crime criminals. This has to be linked to modernization of the IT systems. In a lot of countries they are having plans and developing plans to modernize the IT systems. Also in Europe with a new regulation we have to adapt and we have to change our IT architecture and we have chosen for an integrated data management system. All the relevant data we are entrusted with we have to process this data and we have to do it in an innovative way. We have to be compliant with the data protection rules and we have to be compliant with all the security rules. I can assure you that it is not an easy exercise and we have four different supervisory authorities regarding that. The second one is that we want to increase our response to the threats and we want to increase our operational performance and we have defined five actions for this. We want to strengthen the fight in financial investigations and economical crimes. Why? Because we see that it is a persistent threat. Between 2010 and 2014 we did see that the estimated proceeds of crime were seized and frozen or frozen were only 2.2% and only 1.1% was confiscated in the EU member states. And we see now that there is almost no evolution in this. So the figures are very bad. During the tour in Europe all the police chiefs stressed it that we have to invest more in economical and financial crimes and that we have to tackle and we have to take the organized crime groups and the high value targets there where it hurts the most and this is in the financial sphere. We have had a lot of initiatives on the European level to make life easier for law enforcement with any money laundering directives but we see that the infrastructure we have to work in is not flexible enough and that it still prevents us to share an exchange information among different partners and we need to find better solutions. So for the first time we launched at Europol a transnational public private partnership created in the field of any money laundering and counter terrorist financing and we are in fact assessing what is existing in the different countries and where are the gaps and then we will try to find solutions and we will try to find possible ways to go forward. I have seen the first results of this private public partnership and it is quite promising so I think we are on the right track because we need to build bridges between private and public sector. The second area will be drugs trafficking we still see that 70% of the information we get is drug related information at Europol level. The fight against terrorism the fight against cybercrime and the fight against migrant smuggling and all the related crimes remain very very important but we see that we have to reinforce our fight against drugs trafficking. We see that the illegal drugs market is worth an estimated of 24 billion euros a year. It is a very high figure. We see a significant increase of cocaine coming from Colombia in all the European countries. We see a large increase of public cultivation in Afghanistan which reached record levels in 2018 and the result is higher in quantities of heroin reaching Europe than ever before. We see that fentanyl is raising and we see that there is an incredible misuse of postal services and drug shipments. We also saw that last year, 2018 almost 8000 people in the European Union lost their lives related to drugs. So there is a time and there is a need for more action. We did focus on the three traditional crimes terrorism, cyber crime and migrant smuggling. We did not focus enough on drugs and we have to re-engage in this area. The third priority for our operational responsiveness is crime analysis and I saw in the future plan for the policing in Ireland it's also mentioned that crime analysis are very very important for investigators and that we have to strengthen our methodologies our interoperability of the analysis in between the different countries and that we have to have a higher quality of the analysis. What also surprised me a bit is when I visited the different countries that a lot of people in the law enforcement community ask for a harmonisation of methods and tools on the European level for crime analysis to facilitate cross-border cooperation and increase the potential for analysis conducted in one country to use it before court in another country. We have to deal with big data we have to deal with internet of things there is the cloud these are no emerging threats anymore it is there and we have to deal with it but we have to step up our efforts on a police level on a law enforcement level because we have to do more in this area. Then we have as you maybe know the impact framework the impact framework is about the priorities on the European level in serious and organised crime it is a massive driver to stimulate the different member states in tackling serious and organised crime a lot of money is involved with the impact framework we want to use the impact framework even better in the future and also focus on new areas for instance we have the high value target project it is a project where we want to go after the Suadizant CEOs of the criminal organisations through a prioritisation system and then as a fifth priority we have forensics it is a lot of expertise it is a lot of resources that are demanded it is a lot of knowledge about new technologies so also there is a global understanding in the law enforcement community that we have to put resources together to be at the top level of forensic investigation it is better that we sometimes invest one time than 27 times in this investigative techniques the demand is there and Europol is ready to develop together with the member states an approach in forensics one of our major projects now that is in a very good phase is the decryption platform together with the research and development centre for the European Union we are building a decryption platform for all the member states to decrypt in fact encrypted data it is one of the EU policing solutions for us at Europol we are an agency we have to collaborate together with other agencies the justice and home affairs agencies we are working already together we want to do it better Europol is now sharing the board of the justice and home affairs agencies our aim is to focus on the gaps and on the application what we would like is to have one voice to speak with one voice and to offer one solution to member states that have difficulties to understand who is doing what on European level so together with Frontex for instance we developed five principles to define the cooperation in between us and to avoid duplication of resources and to avoid duplication of investments when we go to a member state we would like to go as the European agency that can do this, this, this for you in the different areas so that it's easier it was a clear demand from different ministers of interior and of justice when I visited the different member states the key partners for Europol are Frontex, EU-LISA for the interoperability agenda high-tech developments the European monitoring centre for drugs and drugs addiction EMC-DDA, C-POL for the trainings of law enforcement and Eurogest they are very important to us now about the links between operational and policy level I don't have to tell you that 2019 is a very important year for us and for you for the politics in the European Union after the elections in May we will have to deal with the new parliament and in October in autumn we will have a new team of commissioners in the European Union we would like to propose them and to ask them to focus again on organized crime and drugs as we see the years before us the role of the commission was very important in the counter-terrorism they allowed us to create the European counter and terrorism centre in Europol we created together with the European institutions the European Migrant Smuggling Centre we were able to create the European cyber crime centre it has grown it has been effective it has proven that it was needed for the security in the Union and we see that in the future we will still have to invest in it and it will keep and it will remain a priority for Europol for instance when we see the figures of migrants we see that there is better border protection now but a lot of the migrants trying to reach the European Union from 90 to 95% of them they are using criminal networks to get in because the controls are stricter so it's more difficult for them to get here so they have to use more illegal networks counter-terrorism there is more information exchange we have a lot of expertise and experts in the European in Europol we have the secure network CTCN we have Europol now involved from the prevention and detection phase for possible attacks in different countries so we will have to continue investing in it and we are convinced that we have to reinforce in organized crime and economical crime why? because we see there is a huge demand it is a huge phenomenon we are confronted with it destabilizes the economy in the European Union we see also that the member states are ready to share sensitive data with Europol because it is a trusted environment and the data that is shared with Europol remains the data of a member state but together we can do a lot more than alone as a country and we can create operational task forces develop an action plan to tackle the serious and organized crime groups and to prioritize whom we are going to tackle together with different countries it is a way to have a real impact on organized crime groups and their infiltration in our economy we are also exploring with our stakeholders the best way to ensure proper support for major investigations at short notice and this is the agile operational support we refer to in our strategy this brings me to the question of the funding Europol has to be funded we have to pay when we have operational meetings Europol pays the travels for instance for the people coming to the meetings we have the discussions now going on in the multi-annual financial framework it's a seven-year period and it will run from 2021 to 2027 and I must say that the proposals that are on the table now do not guarantee that we will be able to deliver in all the areas because we are confronted with the reduction in fact of the budget as it is proposed now so we hope that the ministers, the commissioners and the members of parliament will understand the need for an investment in Europol because it's a direct investment in the member state we talk about innovation, operational support helping in the investigations there are many other issues I could mention about Europol but I am conscious about the time and I would also like to answer some of your questions we will celebrate with Europol the 20th anniversary this year so it's still a young organisation when you compare to national law enforcement agencies in the countries but the growth Europol took I think we are on the good track we are respected, we are trusted and we can deliver real support to member states and we work really in a trusted environment I think also the global issues we are confronted with and the European answers we have to give for the global issues are very important and we try to do this together with the member states so I am a strong believer in European cooperation and I would like to thank the Irish police for the two days and the insights you gave me in your organisation and the proposals you made for the direction Europol should take so I look very positive towards the future and I am ready to give an answer to your questions if it is possible and I thank you very much for your attention