The Strategic Police Matters Unit at the OSCE’s Transnational Threats Department (TNTD/SPMU) together with the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center (SELEC), developed the current version of the Controlled Delivery Manual, which was first published in 2009. Please note that it is available for law enforcement professionals (full-access users) only. See https://polis.osce.org/about for access to restricted materials.
The manual briefly describes the legislation or rules governing controlled deliveries in each of the different countries of the region and explains how to request such a measure. It sketches out details on the role foreign authorities may play in a controlled delivery, the legality of substitution, the duration of such measures and other relevant information. The information is also laid out in tabular format for quick reference.
Most critically, the guide provides details on how to reach authorizing persons across the region. It is extremely difficult to arrange a controlled delivery without prior agreement among the relevant agencies, particularly as circumstances often require its organization at short notice. This guide helps to improve co-operation across states and agencies by providing practitioners with names, contact numbers, fax and e-mail addresses of the authorizing persons in neighbouring countries.
Background
Drug trafficking in South-Eastern Europe remains a serious and complex concern that law enforcement agencies are constantly dealing with. Production and smuggling of illicit drugs is one of the most profitable criminal activities, generating billions of dollars for criminal groups which have a high level of organization and co-ordination, permanently exploiting opportunities to increase profits and circumvent detection.
Success in the fight against cross-border drug trafficking can be achieved only through international co-operation, partnership, exchanging information on seizures, routes, modi operandi, perpetrators, patterns and criminal profiles.
Controlled deliveries, under which illicit narcotic or psychotropic substances and their precursors may pass through a number of countries under the supervision of authorities is a useful tool to identify the scope of such an operation and its perpetrators.
In 2007 and 2008, the OSCE Strategic Police Matters Unit, in co-operation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) organized two anti-drug conferences1 at which experts recommended providing law enforcement agencies with a controlled delivery manual as an aid in combating the trade in illicit drugs and their chemical precursors.
As a result, in March 2008, the OSCE Strategic Police Matters Unit invited the SECI Center to join the project of preparing a Controlled Delivery Manual for South-Eastern Europe. Within the partnership, the task of OSCE was to determine the data collection plan, to deal with the compilation of data, to edit and prepare the manual, while the SECI Center committed itself to support the collection of necessary data from the SECI countries, using the Center’s capacity for information exchange and to keep the manual updated after preparation. Since its launch in 2009, the Controlled Delivery Manual has been a useful tool for the SECI countries used in conducting anti-drug operations. In 2016, the OSCE together with SELEC2 agreed that an updated version of the Controlled Delivery Manual would bring additional benefit to the law enforcement agencies responsible of countering drug trafficking.