Efficiently fighting the OCGs involved in migrant smuggling worldwide by conducting effective investigations and prosecutions, requires specialised support and expertise that Eurojust is able to offer. In order to be successful in the fight against migrant smuggling, early involvement of the judiciary and of international cooperation is crucial. To successfully disrupt and prosecute intricate international smuggling routes, judicial authorities must work together to share information, obtain admissible evidence, trigger investigations in all countries where OCG cells operate, and aim for a coordinated prosecutorial and investigative strategy as well as effective seizure and confiscation of the assets.

The more than 300 cases focusing on migrant smuggling investigations coordinated through Eurojust in 2022, often in close cooperation with Europol, aimed to cover criminal activity along all major migrant smuggling routes to the European Union.

The cases regularly involve the full participation of third countries. Eurojust has designated contact points in non-EU countries with whom it can liaise at both strategic and operational level in specific cases. Further, Eurojust helps involved authorities to develop links with relevant European and international organisations such as EUNAVFOR MED, the EMSC, Frontex and UNODC.

Focus Group on Migrant Smuggling

To further strengthen the fight against migrant smuggling, Eurojust supports a Focus Group for Prosecutors on Migrant Smuggling. It is composed of prosecutors specialised in migrant smuggling from all EU Member States and brings together all concerned actors in the security and criminal justice chain.

The Focus Group serves as an important hub to regularly connect the key judicial actors at national level in the EU Member States who are responsible for tackling migrant smuggling crimes, to support their joint operational response.

Key activities include:

• sharing best practices from landmark migrant smuggling investigations;
• analysing trends and new developments in the operating tactics by organised crime groups (OCGs) active in migrant smuggling;
• Focus Group for Prosecutors on Migrant Smuggling

  Migrant smuggling crimes are committed by connected organised crime groups (OCGs) working in trafficking rings, often ruthlessly endangering the life and limb of the migrants throughout the journey by land, air or sea.

  studying the impact of shifts in migrant smuggling routes; and

• gathering input from judicial practitioners on current specific challenges and discuss the opportunities of judicial cooperation in fighting this specific type of cross-border crime.

In addition to facilitating regular information exchange, supporting the analytical work and ensuring the functioning of the Focus Group, Eurojust hosts an annual meeting at its premises in The Hague.

The creation of the Focus Group follows an initiative of the European Council of October 2018, when EU leaders decided to step up the crackdown on migrant smuggling at EU level. On 6 December 2018, the Justice and Home Affairs Council of the European Union approved a ‘comprehensive and operational set of measures’ to advance the response to migrant smuggling networks, based on an enhanced inter-agency approach both at EU and national level.

Eurojust is at the centre of the judicial component of implementing this intensified operational response. One of the adopted measures includes a call for Eurojust ‘to continue facilitating the networking of practitioners to foster the exchange of best practice, identify challenges and lessons learned in investigation and prosecuting migrant smuggling cases, including by considering the necessity to set up a prosecutors’ network to that end’ (Council document 15250/18).