The information that will be listed on the aircraft, together with the needs of a range of enforcement agencies, has been identified by a Steering Committee comprising the WCO Secretariat project team, national experts from Customs and other partner administrations (civil aviation, criminal inves...
At the start of 2019, in partnership with the European Union, the WCO Secretariat launched the COLIBRI Project to help administrations responsible for enforcement in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa to implement effective controls in general aviation. General aviation covers all civil...
An international database dedicated to general aviation
The objective of the COLIBRI Geoportal is to bring together in one place data relevant to the effective surveillance of movements by general aviation. It therefore includes a databas...
As regards the Geoportal, users will be able to choose between several base maps:
Fragile borders are areas where State agencies, particularly Customs, are unable to operate properly owing to the insecurity created by State or non-State armed groups. Although each fragile and conflict-affected situation (FCS) has its own specificities, similarities do exist across countries in...
From research to an Action Plan
To support Customs administrations which are confronted with FCS, the WCO Secretariat started working with some administrations to analyse the role they play in the security architecture, t...
The security crisis gripping a number of regions in Cameroon has severely disrupted the day‑to-day operations of the local Customs surveillance units. Whether seeking to nurture a survival instinct, protect the physical integrity of staff or forge ahead with surv...
For almost an entire decade, a number of fragile situations have been observed in Cameroon. Since 2014, the armed terrorist group “Jama’atu Ahlul Sunna Lidda’awati Wal Jihad” (Group of the People of Sunnah for Dawa and Jihad), also known as Boko Haram, has held sway in the country’s Nor...
Enhanced cooperation with the defence and security forces
Cooperation between Customs and the other administrations is not a recent phenomenon. It has always been part of Customs’ remit to pledge support to the other ad...
In Haiti, the political instability that followed the departure of President Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 was compounded by a security crisis caused by the military coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. This culminated in the assassination of Presi...
In terms of its organizational structure, the AGD has a general management and technical and administrative departments. It also has 17 field Customs offices responsible for Customs clearance operations and formalities, 12 of which are based in ports and airports and four along the land border. ...
Abductions
The current security situation in Haiti is also having an impact on the working conditions of the AGD and its officials. According to a press release by the UN ...
In Argentina, the Customs, the National Gendarmerie, the Argentine Naval Prefecture, the Airport Security Police and the Federal Police are all responsible for protecting the country’s territory. Cooperating with these agencies is crucial for Customs in remote te...
Overnight, I went from working at a desk in Buenos Aires to La Quiaca, a small city in the north of Argentina, on the southern bank of the La Quiaca River, opposite the town of Villazón, Bolivia. I started my Customs control duties by checking baggage at the Customs office of the Horacio Guzmán...
The Customs Code (Law No. 22,415) divides Argentinian land, water and air territory into many different areas for the application of its control provisions. For the purposes of this article, the most important are:
The Central African Republic (CAR) gained independence in 1960, but has a chequered history of coups d’état and ongoing guerrilla attacks. In 2013, Séléka – a Muslim-dominated coalition of rebel groups from the north, which ousted the former President François Bozizé – be...
The United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) established a Fusion Cells Programme in January 2020 to support United Nations Member States in developing national mechanisms for the exchange and analysis of counter-terrorism related information and the deve...
The Global Fusion Cells Programme
In January 2020, supported by the United Nations Peace and Development Trust Fund (UNPDF) and the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, UNOCT established the Fusion Cells Programme ...
The Programme also offers 13-week training that includes 12 courses and a complementary study guide. The training focuses on the role of the analyst and follows a modular or “building block” approach, which aims to improve trainees’ skillsets in key work-related areas and provides trainees ...
The management of land or maritime borders is different from that of points of entry such as ports or airports, where the main constraint is not the scale of the territory, but rather the scale of the flows. If time is the principle constraint in ports or airports, then space is the main challeng...
Geodata in use today
State agencies use geographic tools for many purposes: to analyse land use; to plan traffic infrastructure; to monitor the environment and agriculture; to respond to disaster management; and to manage...
The French and Nigerien authorities have been working on setting up a region-specific national training centre on coordinated border management. Its purpose is to train the internal security services of the countries of West Africa that have seen security in their ...
The Sahelian border areas, where trade is the main economic resource, were subject to 65% of the violent incidents in 2022. These areas have become sources of financial revenue and influence, for which the armed groups are jostling with the states. In the past, there was little investment in thes...
A region-specific national training centre in Niger
Niger has a 5,690-kilometre-long border with seven countries: Algeria and Libya to...
For more than 10 years, counter-terrorism units have been witnessing the establishment of caliphates by jihadist groups in the Sahel. Although the activities of militant Islamist groups were initially focused on Mali, they have gradually shifted towards the west and south of Burkina Faso and spr...
Groups of traffickers organized into networks have taken advantage of the situation to step up their illicit activities (trafficking in arms, drugs and human beings etc.) in the border areas of the region and of Benin.
At the end of June 2016, a group of WCO experts went to Tunisia as part of a research programme on barriers to trade facilitation with a particular focus on potential obstacles linked to the implementation of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA). The WCO-l...
Humanitarian organizations are some of the actors operating in fragile and conflict-affected situations. This article looks at the constraints they face, and at how Customs administrations can better support their work.
Fragile contexts and the constraints on them
Fragility, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is the combination of exposure to r...
This text is inspired by experience gained in field studies undertaken in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2000 and anthropological research conducted over a period of 18 months in seven border areas that can be considered “fragile,” namely in Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, S...
