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Annual Report of the Secretary General on Police-Related Activities in 2019

Description

The Annual Report of the Secretary General on Police-Related Activities provides a comprehensive overview of all police-related projects, events and programmes implemented by the OSCE executive structures, including by thematic units in the Secretariat, field operations (FOs) and institutions.

Summary

The police-related activities described in this report are presented in two main categories:

  1. general police development and reform, including anti-corruption, gender-based violence, community policing and hate crime; and

  2. countering threats posed by criminal activity, including organized crime, terrorism, trafficking in illicit drugs and chemical precursors, trafficking in human beings (THB), and cybercrime.

This report also provides the number of police-related activities implemented by the OSCE executive structures relating to these categories and a comparison with the previous years (see charts on the following pages 7 to 9), which shows a slight increase in comparison to the previous year.

In 2019, the majority of all OSCE police-related activities, 56 per cent, were dedicated to general police development and reform. In this area, a particular focus was placed on activities addressing police development and reform, community policing, police-public relations and gender-based violence, which altogether covered 59 per cent of all activities in this category. When compared to 2018, a reduction in activities was observed in relation to the number of human rights and police accountability initiatives (167 in 2018 to 47 in 2019), with the main decrease seen in South-Eastern Europe (SEE). However, in contrast to 2018, the number of activities aimed at strengthening specialized investigation units and forensics tripled, with a notable increase in activities devoted to enhancing human resources and police management and gender mainstreaming.

The total number of activities addressing threats posed by criminal activity rose by four per cent in respect to 2018, covering 44 per cent of all total police-related activities. In line with the trend seen since 2015, activities related to counter-terrorism and Preventing Terrorism and Countering Violent Extremism that Lead to Terrorism (P/C VERLT), THB and migration-related crime and cybercrime continued to steadily increase, constituting 63 per cent of all activities in the area of threats posed by criminal activities.

When analysing the OSCE ́s focus on police-related activities since 2015, a few conclusions can be drawn.

  1. Although activities relating to general police development and reform have remained predominant over this period, in 2019, the percentage of initiatives in this category compared to the total of police-related activities was the lowest since 2015. In contrast, the percentage of activities addressing threats posed by criminal activity in 2019 was the highest since 2015.
  2. There was a continuous increase of activities focused on combating gender-based violence, addressing counter- terrorism and P/C VERLT, and cybercrime. On the other hand, a substantial decrease was in activities related to strategic planning including threat assessments (from 25 in 2015 to one in 2019).
  3. The highest number of all police-related activities since 2015 was dedicated to activities focusing on community policing, police-public relations and crime prevention.