Abstract:
The project reported here is a three-country project, Estonia, Finland and the
UK. It is funded by the European Commission AGIS Programme, The
Directorate General Justice, Freedom and Security. It investigates the issues of
corruption by organised crime in relation to border controls and immigration
using as a case study the Finnish-Russian and the Estonian-Russian border. It
also considers the methods of facilitation of people across borders, the role of
crime groups and networks as well as organised crime and the relationship
between illegal facilitation and exploitation in the labour market.
The aim of the research was to investigate whether at border points there was
evidence of corruption of officials in order to facilitate people across the border
illegally. The issue of organised crime was identified as an important factor in
understanding how people might be moved across borders illegally. If there
was evidence of organised crime it would suggest that transnational networks
between organised crime groups might exist and that there are strategic forms
of communication between the organised crime groups in order to facilitate the
maximisation of profit through the movement of people. If such an influence of
organised crime in ‘immigration crime’ were to be discovered then it would
indicate that EU borders are porous and therefore readily exploited by
organised crime groups.
In Finland, particular attention was given to the issues concerning the
‘Development Plan of Border Guards’ and the planned cooperation in relation
to Organised Crime and Combating Corruption. The contention was that the
EU border with Russia is ‘weak’ and vulnerable to corruption at different
levels: systemic, institutional and individual. Our argument was that corruption
is used to maintain the flow of people across the border illegitimately by
utilising existing legitimate channels. It was the Finnish view that organised
crime groups used the Finnish – Russian and the Russian – Estonian borders to
bring in illegal immigrants into the EU.
Consequently the project was designed to take account of organised
immigration crime and so was required to address the issue of human
trafficking along with people smuggling and facilitation of people across
borders. This raised a number of definitional issues and highlighted the varying
perspectives between academic approaches to the problem and those of senior
policy makers and operational staff.
